This week we have been learning about Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was born 1898 in Germany. In his early 30's he worked as a medic in WWI but he was appalled by war, he decided to move to Berlin to work in theatre. However, when the Nazis came into power, he fled the country because he was a communist, resulting in his citizenship being removed. He decided to live in the USA where he gained citizenship in 1941. He was a strong communist and was not afraid of expressing his views, hence, was a target of the House of Un-American Activities, who were very much anti communist. He moved back to Germany In 1947. He then founded the Berliner Ensemble. He was vastly influenced, having lived through two world wars he was very political and expressed his strong views through the medium of theatre.
Epic Theatre
-He wanted to make the audience distant from emotional involvement.
-Brecht was against cathartic theatre
One famous quote of his " Hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom." emphasised his desire to engage the audience.
VerfremdungseffectThis term is also known as the alienation effect, however, Brecht only wanted his audience to feel distanced, he wanted them to be engaged and excited but not emotionally involved and this always involved breaking the forth wall.
Brecht's Techniques
-Narration
-Coming out of role
-Speaking stage directions
-Directly addressing the audience
-Using placards
-Multi-rolling
-Minimal props, costume and set
-Symbolic props or lighting
-Song and Dance
-Montage
-Spass (Fun)
-Gestus (Gestures)
-Narrative which jumps around in time
-Freeze frames
On Monday we were split into groups and were given a script, one of Brecht's pieces of work. We began by listing the large number of characters in the script. There were more characters than actors, so this meant we would have to use of Brecht's techniques, multi rolling. I was given the role of the mother in law as the characters are Russian and I was asked to try and do a strong old Russian accent, unfortunately I could not do this. We then started to label props in the style Brecht did. For example, we labelled a piece of paper with Child, or guitar, to show that we were trying to think and adopt Brechts own techniques into our interpretation but also keep minimal props which is also another technique.
The script we were given doesn't really make much sense and is extremely boring, after some digging we discovered this script was meant to be boring which made me think why, if Brecht wanted his audience to be engaged in his theatre but still not attached why would he write something boring, I do not believe this piece of theatre would engage an audience in anyway, also another technique of Brecht is spass, which means fun, this piece of theatre is not fun in the slightest.
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Thursday, 12 February 2015
Evaluation
Overall I think this whole devising unit was a very good unit to do, the thing I enjoyed most was being able to take control of what we were creating and didn't have to many barriers of what we were and weren't allowed to create and if we did it was because they were barriers we put in place to suit the overall performance.
This devising process started off quite slow as we found the stimulus to be quite narrow and we didn't know where we could go with it but after research and loads of brainstorms we eventually got to the Gang idea and we were going to stick to this, the first thing we did was workshop as a group a scene of the gang raping our only girl, we knew we wanted a love story but the Gang didn't want them to be happy so we came up with the rape idea, this rape scene then turned out to be called the attack scene with the boss of the gang beating up and eventually killing the main girl Tess, and through audience feedback this was probably our most successful and powerful scene.
After a week of more brainstorms and research we added on this author idea, the author was writing the story but had someone else above him controlling him, it was very puppeteer orientated at the start but then we moved away from that and developed that the person above the author is in fact the author himself and he is slightly insane. We all really liked this idea as a group but we didn't quite know how to intertwine the author with the story and as the author (me) wasn't actually in the same story as the other characters this meant for most of the devising process I was just sitting around or coming up with ideas for other scenes. As a whole I think our group worked extremely well together when devising ideas and if we had more time we would have been able to workshop the ideas that we just didn't use as we didn't think they would work, so if I was to do this unit again I would perhaps try and workshop a lot more ideas before getting into creating the final piece.
With this piece we really wanted to get as many techniques in as we could but making sure they were all in the right place and not just put in for the sake of it, e.g, we put in slow motion in the middle of a stage combat scene, movement, dance, composite set, drumming, split screen and maybe a few others. I know for a fact from feedback that thinks like our drumming worked extremely well with our attack scene which was also stage combat, our movement piece worked very well too.
Things we could have improved on as a group probably could have been more focused at the start as we didn't have a massive time scale to get this one and in the end we did and it worked well but I would have preferred to get the devising and creating done fairly quickly so we could have moved onto perfecting everything as we only really had one week to do this, and this made me very nervous as our tech run before our performance was in fact awful. At the end of the performance the author is supposed to be so stressed that his story didn't end happy after rewriting the ending three times, he hangs himself, we wanted to do this in silhouette as it would be quite graphic but also another technique that would have suited that particular death, we never tried out the silhouette until the day of the performance, we realised that it didn't work so we quickly had to come up with a new ending, this was stressful as we should have planned that ending a lot sooner so we knew we would have been able to do it, in the end I had to just get a gun and shoot myself, which is not a bad way to kill myself off but I don't feel it is as dramatic as hanging and also by not doing the silhouette we missed out on one technique which we had the idea of using right from the start. In the attack scene with Tess we had her get killed behind blocks so all people saw was the boss punching, we put fake blood on Tess's face to give it a more realistic effect and also try and get a reaction from the audience, but from feedback we gathered that it was very obvious the blood was painted on and it was too neat, it needed to be more splattered.
I think if we had more time we would have been able to work on our story line a bit more and really develop it so it made more sense but we had to create a piece with roughly a thirty minute limit so we couldn't stretch out our story too much. From audience feedback we found out that our piece was border line too much stage combat, I knew it would be but that was the main focus of our piece really, and we only used the stage combat twice but we also had a movement scene that was also quite stage combat like, this movement piece could have been perfected during the middle of it, it was very quickly thrown together as we were never quite sure on what three endings we wanted but eventually this one would lead to the death of Fin (the second ending out of three)
Another thing with out three endings would be to make sure its more clear that the endings don't connect it was in fact my character, the author rewriting the endings each time because he was aiming for a happy ending but could never get one.
Due to the fact my character wasn't in the same scenes as the other characters it gave me the opportunity to do the lighting for our performance which I loved. I really thought out what I wanted for each scene and how it can make the scene better, I spent around two weeks plotting all the lighting then an additional week working out all the fade ins and outs, I feel my role doing lighting was very professional and worked seamlessly with the performance and perhaps enhanced some scenes, doing the lighting also meant I learnt something knew which was how to use the lighting desk, how to set up all the lights and connect them all together, and now I feel I could do this again with confidence and ease.
As a whole I was extremely pleased with how our whole performance went on the day and also how well my group worked together, we only had very small arguments between two people once or twice but each time we never let it affect our piece as we carried on devising and creating, if I was to do this unit again I would happily be in the same group as I feel we all worked well together and the ideas the we shared were then improved with the opinions of the other group members.
This devising process started off quite slow as we found the stimulus to be quite narrow and we didn't know where we could go with it but after research and loads of brainstorms we eventually got to the Gang idea and we were going to stick to this, the first thing we did was workshop as a group a scene of the gang raping our only girl, we knew we wanted a love story but the Gang didn't want them to be happy so we came up with the rape idea, this rape scene then turned out to be called the attack scene with the boss of the gang beating up and eventually killing the main girl Tess, and through audience feedback this was probably our most successful and powerful scene.
After a week of more brainstorms and research we added on this author idea, the author was writing the story but had someone else above him controlling him, it was very puppeteer orientated at the start but then we moved away from that and developed that the person above the author is in fact the author himself and he is slightly insane. We all really liked this idea as a group but we didn't quite know how to intertwine the author with the story and as the author (me) wasn't actually in the same story as the other characters this meant for most of the devising process I was just sitting around or coming up with ideas for other scenes. As a whole I think our group worked extremely well together when devising ideas and if we had more time we would have been able to workshop the ideas that we just didn't use as we didn't think they would work, so if I was to do this unit again I would perhaps try and workshop a lot more ideas before getting into creating the final piece.
With this piece we really wanted to get as many techniques in as we could but making sure they were all in the right place and not just put in for the sake of it, e.g, we put in slow motion in the middle of a stage combat scene, movement, dance, composite set, drumming, split screen and maybe a few others. I know for a fact from feedback that thinks like our drumming worked extremely well with our attack scene which was also stage combat, our movement piece worked very well too.
Things we could have improved on as a group probably could have been more focused at the start as we didn't have a massive time scale to get this one and in the end we did and it worked well but I would have preferred to get the devising and creating done fairly quickly so we could have moved onto perfecting everything as we only really had one week to do this, and this made me very nervous as our tech run before our performance was in fact awful. At the end of the performance the author is supposed to be so stressed that his story didn't end happy after rewriting the ending three times, he hangs himself, we wanted to do this in silhouette as it would be quite graphic but also another technique that would have suited that particular death, we never tried out the silhouette until the day of the performance, we realised that it didn't work so we quickly had to come up with a new ending, this was stressful as we should have planned that ending a lot sooner so we knew we would have been able to do it, in the end I had to just get a gun and shoot myself, which is not a bad way to kill myself off but I don't feel it is as dramatic as hanging and also by not doing the silhouette we missed out on one technique which we had the idea of using right from the start. In the attack scene with Tess we had her get killed behind blocks so all people saw was the boss punching, we put fake blood on Tess's face to give it a more realistic effect and also try and get a reaction from the audience, but from feedback we gathered that it was very obvious the blood was painted on and it was too neat, it needed to be more splattered.
I think if we had more time we would have been able to work on our story line a bit more and really develop it so it made more sense but we had to create a piece with roughly a thirty minute limit so we couldn't stretch out our story too much. From audience feedback we found out that our piece was border line too much stage combat, I knew it would be but that was the main focus of our piece really, and we only used the stage combat twice but we also had a movement scene that was also quite stage combat like, this movement piece could have been perfected during the middle of it, it was very quickly thrown together as we were never quite sure on what three endings we wanted but eventually this one would lead to the death of Fin (the second ending out of three)
Another thing with out three endings would be to make sure its more clear that the endings don't connect it was in fact my character, the author rewriting the endings each time because he was aiming for a happy ending but could never get one.
Due to the fact my character wasn't in the same scenes as the other characters it gave me the opportunity to do the lighting for our performance which I loved. I really thought out what I wanted for each scene and how it can make the scene better, I spent around two weeks plotting all the lighting then an additional week working out all the fade ins and outs, I feel my role doing lighting was very professional and worked seamlessly with the performance and perhaps enhanced some scenes, doing the lighting also meant I learnt something knew which was how to use the lighting desk, how to set up all the lights and connect them all together, and now I feel I could do this again with confidence and ease.
As a whole I was extremely pleased with how our whole performance went on the day and also how well my group worked together, we only had very small arguments between two people once or twice but each time we never let it affect our piece as we carried on devising and creating, if I was to do this unit again I would happily be in the same group as I feel we all worked well together and the ideas the we shared were then improved with the opinions of the other group members.
Performance Space
The performance space we have for our devised piece is almost perfect for our story, we are set in 1930's New York and our main characters are a gang, the gang operate out of a warehouse and this makes our performance space ideal as its a decent sized room with very high celling (very warehouse like) and there are white curtains on three out of the four walls, with these I plan to put stuff behind them to prop the curtains out so we can use them as wings and also give an effect that its boxes of stuff in the warehouse but covered up. We also have a few scenes in a Speakeasy bar which were traditionally underground in 1930's as alcohol was illegal and the curtains create a closed in underground effect.
This small space also enables the audience to be a little more involved with the story and the action that's going on, this helps the author aspect of the story line as I am writing a story and then the audience see it come alive right before their eyes.
For the speak easy scene we planned to have chairs set out for the characters to sit at but then we decided we would use something called a composite set, a composite set is when one thing turns into lots of other things, for example as I am playing the author and I'm in a different time period I am raised up on blocks, but we have two blocks left over still that make a kind of wall at the back, these two blocks then stand up to make the bar for the bartender and then a table in the middle of the room for the gang to stand around, this then can change into a chair for someone to sit on and so on, with this we save space of scenery as its always changing and we only really have two blocks which makes our scenery, this is also another technique that we hope to help push up our grades.
This small space also enables the audience to be a little more involved with the story and the action that's going on, this helps the author aspect of the story line as I am writing a story and then the audience see it come alive right before their eyes.
For the speak easy scene we planned to have chairs set out for the characters to sit at but then we decided we would use something called a composite set, a composite set is when one thing turns into lots of other things, for example as I am playing the author and I'm in a different time period I am raised up on blocks, but we have two blocks left over still that make a kind of wall at the back, these two blocks then stand up to make the bar for the bartender and then a table in the middle of the room for the gang to stand around, this then can change into a chair for someone to sit on and so on, with this we save space of scenery as its always changing and we only really have two blocks which makes our scenery, this is also another technique that we hope to help push up our grades.
My Character
The role I will be playing in my devised piece is an author, the idea is that the author is writing the story that needs to end happy because he needs to please 'him' which when presented to the audience should be suggested to be someone above the author making him write the story but our idea is that the author is a bit mental and 'him' is himself, the author is his biggest critic and eventually drives himself insane with his failed story and kills himself.
My character needs to start off calm and collected but still have a hint that he is a bit mental so I don't seem like I jump to a different character half way through. Also we want the audience to connect with the author some how, maybe feel sorry for him so when he does hang himself its very dramatic and maybe even emotional.
This is what I want the author to look like, this is how I see the author, very smart and slick but if you look closely into this mans eyes it just seems some what mysterious and angry. This photo has some old and modern qualities to it which is also good as my author is set near enough modern time but dresses like he is in 1930's as the character has some connection to that time period.
My character needs to start off calm and collected but still have a hint that he is a bit mental so I don't seem like I jump to a different character half way through. Also we want the audience to connect with the author some how, maybe feel sorry for him so when he does hang himself its very dramatic and maybe even emotional.
Music
This is a piece of music that inspired our devised piece, we knew we wanted a 1930's style but the difficult thing was creating this atmosphere, so we thought the best way would be through a piece of music that was very 1930's style, this piece of music then inspired us to go and make a scene that was set in a speakeasy bar and then a dance/ movement piece to show the start of a relationship. Overall I think this piece of music was really good as it set a good atmosphere and just made it a bit more clear that our piece was set in 1930's
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