Bertolt Brecht Workshop 04/03/14

Unit 13: Contemporary Theatre Performance - Brecht
Unit 1: Performance Workshop

When having a group discussion about the key rehearsal tasks that we all need to do, we discussed the following:

• Learning lines - Learning your lines, i would say is one of the most important things you need to do first when starting your play. As soon as you receive your script and are aware of what character you are playing, you should begin learning your lines as soon as possible; the sooner you know your lines, the sooner you can start blocking the play and begin exploring different ways of saying your lines e.g different tones of voice, accents, characterisation. If you are rehearsing 2 weeks before the performance with your script still in hand, it will show that you are unorganised and not fully committed and you will be letting everybody else down.
• Blocking - Blocking is all about planning your entrances and exits, where you're standing when you say your lines, the space where you perform, and most importantly, proxemics.
• Props/Costumes - Costumes and props are normally something you consider thinking about when you begin learning your lines, you need to make sure you have the correct costume and props that would suit your character, their personality, their posture, their attitude, and also the time they lived in. It is also important to have your costume and props prepared early in the process to ensure they fit correctly and are used correctly.
• Characterisation - A script can only give you so much information about your character, and how they move, speak, think, and their relationships. So it's important you take this into account when playing your character. You need to think about what life would be like, what other characters they seem to like, characters they seem to hate, certain dislikes of theirs etc.
• Research - Research is also key when baring all the above in mind. In order to know the play itself, you need to be aware of the author/play writer, maybe different actors that have played the characters in the play and how they played them, whether different actors played the characters differently. It's also important to know how characters can convey the themes and knowing where your characters come from. Looking for reviews of the play is also helpful as it is good to know what people think of it.

Responsibilities:

Although my character is only in the beginning of the play, I also participate in the chorus and I play a wolf and servants. I have also adapted a directors role, giving my classmates advice with their lines, different ways of saying them, where they could stand and also I have found great pieces of music for certain scenes, in once scene I have combined two pieces of music and played them at the same time to give a howling effect, representing wolves. The pieces I have combines are called:

- Running wolf 

- Wolves in the wind (25 minute version, which in rehearsals I keep replaying as the howling of wolves creates such an eerie ambiance. 


WOTW - Didactic

intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive.

This afternoon, we talked about Bertolt Brecht and his techniques and talent. We mostly talked about Verfremdungseffekt ( the V effect). Brecht used this to direct the audience's attention to something new.

"From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his “epic theatre”, synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas." www.actorhub.co.uk

Epic Theatre came about when Melodrama, realism, and naturalism were very popular forms of theatre. The point was for the audience to believe the characters were real and the story was real, letting the audience forget about everything and enjoy a performance. Brecht hated that type of theatre; he believed that performances were something that the audience should question and think about, so he then created Epic Theatre. He used his techniques to break the illusion of drama. Brecht believed that the actors job was to solely show what is happening, he did not want the actors to play the role realistically, which was the opposite of Stanislavki's purpose in theatre.



FACT 
"Dialectical theatre is a label that the German modernist theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht came to prefer near the end of his career over epic theatre to describe the style of theatre he pioneered . From his later perspective, the term "Epic Theatre" had become too formal a concept to be of use anymore; one of Brecht's most-important aesthetic innovations prioritized function over the sterile opposition between form and content. According to Manfred Wekwerth, one of Brecht's directors at the Berliner Ensemble at the time, the term refers to the "'dialecticizing' of events" that his theatre produces" www.wikepedia.com

 

Brecht always used to try and get the audience involved by speaking to them during the performance. We did use this in Wolves; in the school scene where the inspector comes to inspect the work house, we thought it would be a really good idea for the Megan who plays the inspector to walk around the theatre, inspecting the audience, which I think would instigate a good reaction from the audience. Also, when we play wolves, we repeatedly look at the audience, and when in the chorus, we speak to the audience as if we are keeping them involved, telling them the story and things that are to come.


PLACARDS

We had the iPads and did a few small exercises using a placards app, and had a mess around with them using them for different stories, ideas etc. Which then gave us the idea to use plain white card to project images onto for our performances. When putting this into practice, we also found a piece of music which we used to run around the stage with our cards moving to different places ready to project a different image onto the card, I thought this worked really well and added an ambience and huge affect to the scenes.