4^th December 2012

In today’s lesson we put all of the pieces of our performance together, the songs, the Blondie scenes and the people in power scenes, so that we could rehearse them all together and refine the performance. This was really essential for us as next week we are performing our theatre pieces to an audience, so as we have had limited time, it was really important that we worked hard and got our piece together.

 I think that in our piece there are sections that we need to work on to be ready for next week, things that we need to work on by ourselves and in groups. For me, there are two main sections that I need to work on to make presentable for the performance next week. One of the sections that we need to work on is our people in power scenes on Margret Thatcher. In general our scene needs to be made more solid as it can become quite unstructured and can loose its cause sometimes when we are performing. Consequently we need to reform and re-establish the structure of the scene so that it can become more fluid and natural to us and we don’t have to think about it, I also think that it will make more of a stronger image to the audience and more of an impact on them. Also in these scenes we need to act our scenes in more of a Brectian style. In the Blondie scene we are acting more naturalistically, so it is important that in this Margret Thatcher scenes we need to exercise the Brectian style of acting that we have been exploring. I also think that as in these scenes we are being people through history, who have committed crimes against humanity, and for someone to have to become that person, like Hitler, it would be very hard to get into their mental state, so performing it in a Brechtian style would be better as you don’t have to become the character. More over it is important that we act these scenes in a Brechtian style as we are trying to represent the people and the crimes that they have committed. To do this we are going exaggerate our characters and make them more stereotypes and grotesque, to show that we are not the character, just representations of them and to stop the audience from connecting with them.

The other part of the performance that I need to work on by myself is my speech as Blondie, when she gets elected in as Prime Minister. I think that I need to characterise the speech and Blondie a lot more, as right now I am just saying the speech in a typical politician way, where as with Blondie I need to make it a lot sexual and to make her more sensual so that it is clear to the audience why she is so appealing and why people are voted for her. I need to look a the speech and to work out more of a distinctive, sensual voice for Blondie to make the speech more representative of beauty and power coming together, more interesting and entertaining for the audience to watch.

 

What do we want the audience to take away from our performance?

At the end of the lesson we started to think about the message of our piece and what we want the audience to take away from it. Personally I think that our piece of theatre has more than one message to it and according to different parts of the play it says different things to the audience.

 At the start of the performance, with the polling cards with just faces and Blondie coming into power, I think the message we are trying to send to the audience is why do we vote for the people we vote for? We are making them think of the reason as to why they voted for the person they did vote for and if their appearance or personality had an impact on that more than their policies. We are making them consider how much we really know about the leaders of our countries and if they could be completely different people behind closed doors. Leading on from this, it also makes us wonder how much the politicians are telling us and if what they are telling us is really what they are planning or just what we want to hear.

Later on in our performance I think another message that we are sending our audience is one of what power does to people and is it right that they worst people get remembered? This is shown in our people in power scenes, such as the Bin Laden one or the Bush one. These scenes are demonstrating how horrible crimes against humanity have to be to get public acknowledgement and that those people, like Hitler, are so well known for something so horrific and even more well known than people that have done really good things in their life, and we are asking them if that is right?

Finally I think the last part of our piece of theatre sends out another message and personally I think this is the most important message of the performance. At the end of our piece Blondie revels that the reason for her mass murder was to make “England get a grip” to show the people of Britain how good they have their own life and to be grateful for what we have and for the people we love. It also puts our first world problems into perspective and to stop complaining and to realise how lucky we are. However it also makes the audience think about how much it takes to makes them be thankful of what they have and that it takes something as horrible as a genocide for England to realise what a good country we have because we can be with the people we love in safety.

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20^th November 2012

In today’s we lesson we looked more at the ensemble essence in theatre, doing exercises that get us to engage with the skills that we will need to be part of an ensemble and the problems that we might face. We also began to put our political theatre piece together, being given and our individual parts, and starting to block the piece and put it together.

In the script we used many of the Brechtian styles of acting; this helps us to engage with our theatre practitioner and the ways that we should be engaging with our characters and the piece of theatre. This is shown in our piece where we have a number of sections where people are talking about who they are voting for in the elections, and during this time, instead of having set, we the actors become the set, in the form of objects and people. For example in the bar scene, I am the bar, in the office, I am a filling cabinet, in the benefits office, I am in the queue and in the common room, I am a hippy student. These all set the scene to the audience and give the atmosphere of all the different areas of society. Brecht also thought that set and staging should be simple, so by using ourselves as the set we aren’t using complex scenery that constantly has to be moved, also we are reinforcing the fact to the audience that they are watching a play and that everything on stage is a representation not real people or situations. 

Also we are using narrators in our piece of theatre to describe the action on stage and to break down the forth wall between the audience. We are using different types of narration, for example we have the traditional narrators that set the scene and give the audience the information that they need; for example we have some narrators give the audience a background on general elections. This is effective because it gives the audience the information that they need on elections as not everyone is politically aware, but also it gives them the sense that they are part of the an election happening at the moment, because they will be voting and this is the type of information that is given out to people while elections are in place to boost voting numbers. We also are using narrators in a big speech that Blondie does, where she is giving the winning speech outside number 10, the narrators are going to be describing all the stage directions that Blondie makes, for example pushing her hair back or licking her lips. This is a very specific type of narration that Brecht uses as it disengages the audience from the emotions of the play and allows them to know that what they are watching isn’t real. This is really effective for our own piece of theatre as we are presenting Blondie in a really glamorous way in the start, however we don’t want the audience to connect with her because she turns out to be a mass murder. Also she is just a representation how people get into power, how little we can know about them and what they can turn out to be.

Also we are using singing narration were we montage the election campaign to Blondies Song “Call Me”, but changing the lyrics to “Vote Me”, not only is this telling the background of the story in a quick way, it is also putting humour into the show, as Brecht always through that theatre should have humour in it and it puts that in even though our piece has a very serious subject matter.

Then we have the scenes from our play that we are doing: “Blondie” and in between them we are putting the piece of theatre we devised last week on the leaders that have committed crimes against humanity, this allows all of us to play more than one character, so that we don’t get attached emotionally or connected to the characters that we are playing because we should only be representing them. Also it reinforces the message of our piece of theatre because it shows how we, the public, elect people but then we allow then to do horrible things to our country because we believed the facade that they presented. It also builds up to the audience the idea of what Blondie might have done to Britain.

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13^th November 2012

In the first part of this lesson we had a workshop on ensemble work. In this workshop we had to do a number of exercises that explored the different skills you need to have to be successful in an ensemble piece and the issues that might be presented.

In the exercises we learnt about the concentration that you need in an ensemble piece of theatre as we learnt that a lot could be happening at one time, and you need to be aware all the time and to be in contact mentally and engaged with one and other, so that the performers can all be in sync with each other, creating a stronger, more focused and more powerful piece of theatre. This was really interesting for me as it showed me how much mental work needs to go into being part of an ensemble, because people can often think that being in a group you can just go along not really being involved in the piece and thinking that you aren’t important. However this showed me how powerful a piece of theatre can be if everyone is fully involved and dedicated to it.

I also learnt how powerful and visually effective being in an ensemble piece of theatre can be as it can emphasis a point or a message, as before I always thought of acting naturalistically get messages across the best because you can be connect to the emotions and moved by them. However from doing these exercises I learnt that breachtian style of acting, where gestus is used and in fact an ensemble can be as powerful on sending a message to the audience as it grabs the audiences attention and by having everyone engaged can show the audience how meaningful and important the message is.

We then went back to the play that we are using as our stimulus, “Blondie”, and we looked at the list of people that she listed as have engaged in crimes against humanity, for example Bin Laden, Hitler, Blair, we each had to pick a person and create a piece of brechtian theatre around that person. In our group we picked to do our piece on Thatcher, in this piece we highlighted the main things that stood out in her lifetime and in her career as the prime minister, we pick the hype that surrounded her being the first woman Prim Minister, then the shutting down of the mines, the IRA and the taxing of milk. These were just some of the most heard of things that Margret Thatcher did, and some of the feed back was that we could put in more things about her childhood, or something to make us know more about her. We then made her really exaggerated and unbelievable because this unconnected her to the audience and also it made her seem more of a representation of people in government than her as a character. We also made the other actors play more than one of the character this made us not connect to the characters that we were playing, even though some of the subjects could have been quite emotional. However I think that we could have elongated the scenes that we do, because we went over some of the subjects, such as the IRA, to make them more effective and to show more of what happened and the crimes against humanity that she committed. We also used humour, in the form of song, in our piece of theatre because Brecht always liked the use of the humour to send messages in another way. This also uses the idea of alienating the audience as they become very aware that they are watching a piece of theatre with a very distinct message to it.

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6^th November 2012

In today’s lesson we explored the Brecht style of acting, and some of the techniques that he uses when putting on a production. We did exercises that explore the use of Gestus, exaggeration, narration and verfremdungseffekt. These exercises all explored the ideas behind Brechtian acting, for example: we looked at the use of stereotypes, narrators and disconnecting ourselves as actors from the characters and learning how to represent them but not be them.

This lesson helped me to learn and understand more about epic theatre and to understand how to get into the mindset of an epic theatre actor. I learnt more about how to alienate the actors and the audience from the characters and to make sure that they know that what they are seeing on stage isn’t real but a piece of fiction being shown to reflect society and political issues. I learnt that epic theatre is more about what it is trying to say to the audience rather than creating a different world from the audience, this is why narration and verfremdungseffekt is used, so that the fourth wall is broken down and the audience are aware that a message is trying to get across to them. Also for the actors using narration and having to play more than one character helped me to understand more about epic theatre and about Brecht’s style of acting because it made me become less attached and connected to the one character as I couldn’t become them because I would have to step out of that character into another one in a fluid movement, without having time to connect or get into the mindset of that character, so by using techniques such as gestus really helped me to understand how gestures and attitudes can portray a character without having to be them.

I found Brechtian theatre at first to be unnatural and slightly strange, as when I normally act or approach a character I find that I want to connect with them, I want to be able to understand them and I find that my view of good, strong acting is when I see someone and I don’t think of them as the actor but as the character and I am absorbed into the world that is being shown to me and the massage should be shown that way. So when I came to approaching characters and the exercises that we had to do, I found that a lot of them felt forced or unnatural for me, especially when we had to do the verfremdungseffekt exercise and had to take a very serious subject and make it strange by saying the stage directions. I found that it didn’t feel right when I was acting it because suddenly I felt disconnected from the character. However the more exercises that I did I could see and start to understand why Brecht would want to alienate the audience and the actors from the characters as he felt the message of the piece of theatre was more important and that the audience should leave the theatre with something to think about. This is why Brecht and the political theatre goes so well together because it is about the message and trying to effect the audience and make  a change in the world through the use of theatre, which is something that I think is very important in theatre and I believe that theatre and the arts can be very powerful and have a large effect on the world and current issues.