Refunctioning

Refunctioning (Umfunktionierung) is a core strategy of the aesthetic developed by the German modernist theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht.

"Brecht wanted his theatre to intervene in the process of shaping society," Robert Leach explains, so in his work:

"[the] duality of form and content was replaced (to over-schematise briefly) by a triad of content (better described in Brecht's case by the formalist term 'material'), form (again the formalist term 'technique' is more useful here) and function. In Brecht's dramatic form, these three constantly clash but never properly coalesce to compose a rounded whole."