Brecht Unit

Brecht's use of acting style is very different to other playwrights, I realized that since he uses epic theatre him and Stanislwaski's way of teaching were almost the same, however Brecht believed that gestures played a more important role in his performances whereas Stanislwaski was more about the facial expressions. I found it an interesting way of acting, I always thought acting was about trying to interact with the audience and make them feel emotionally attached, but when I learned about epic theatre it was not always the case. I did not know how an audience cannot get attached to the characters, but then I learned this was done for a reason, it was so that rather entertaining the audience, the play becomes an awareness and message and the gestures and actions happening on stage has a reason behind it and contributes to the overall theme of the play depending on what it is which was usually social issues being the division of social classes. I think it is an effective way to get the audience to think about what is occuring on stage and trying to figure out the message, in a way also participating in the act, by putting the puzzle pieces together and seeking to find a whole image or message in the end. I just kept thinking how can a audience sit there and not get engaged and emotionally attached? when I know I would. But then I learned about alienation devices, where actors use this to build a fourth wall between them and the audience which disables the audience not to get too attached to their characters yet still engaging with them. I also did not know how actors can't connect to their characters until I tried it myself.

At the beginning of the epic theatre unit, we were divided into two groups and were given pictures that symbolized an important point. In our group we had to look at these pictures and discuss what we thought they meant. There were two of the pictures that stood out to me, one was a picture of a mother and a daughter looking very sad and surrounding them was their home, by home I mean tents and houses made of carboard boxes and around them were piles of garabage that was polluting their environment. By looking at this pictures it made me realize the affect of the social classes the rich and the poor. There are so many poor people in the world yet people say they care but they don't do anything about this. To me actions speak louder than words, the only reason I would like to become rich is to give money to the poor and I don't need fancy cars, a house with 55 rooms to be happy in I just need the right and fair amount of money to keep a roof over my head and food on the table. That's what these people are asking for and it breaks my heart to see that there are so many of us that complain about how our lives are not good enough but it's nothing compared to what they go through. It's a pitty that there is even such a thing happening, it's evident that the rich does not care and will only give to the poor if they benefit from it I think, get a reward etc but isn't a reward seeing them smile and living a better life? that would be more than enough for me. Another picture that stood out was one where there was a vulture and a skinny african child on the floor crouching in the heat and the vulture just staring at him. This to me represented how the rich being the vulture is feeding on the poor and they don't realize how much they could help, but only realize and do so once it's too late. This picture really touched me, it just ashame what we let happen sometimes, it's unacceptable and everyday I hope that there's a solution to these kind of problems but the main one is for people to wake up, once they notice with their real eyes and realize what's happening maybe they will do something about it, however it's not always about seeing is believing, knowing that it's happening people should believe in it. Just the 'thought' of it even just makes me want to cry. Brecht's goal was to use social issues like this to portray to the audience what is really going on around them, since some people are just blinded by reality. He wants the audience to leave the theatre with that message in their heads knowing how it affects them and what they can do to make it better. After we looked at the photos we had to come up with a performance that demonstrated these problems, Asceal, Morcorm, Su yin and I came up with a scenario where there is a rich president and has a daughter that's also wealthy a poor shop keeper and a journalist. The president is interviewed by the journalist who is me, and asks questions about the economic crisis that the president just doesn't seem to care about. As the journalist it was a tough role to play, I think it was challenging to not get too attached to what I was doing and focus more on the point I was trying to prove which was that the rich people including the president does not care about the people and only himself. As an alienation device I would stand up and get out of character and narrate in third person about what the journalist thought about the president, it was a way of getting the audience to engage more and to not get too attached at the same time. His daughter goes shopping and meets a shop keeper and is very greedy to her since she is rich she thinks she can do anything, later they become friends and brings her home to the presidents house and realizes that there are so many poor people and that her dad the president has to do something about this problem. He first disagrees but later realizes that his people need him and solves the problem, depicting what people should really do and not just sit there and watch people die, everyone is born and because of that, they matter. I think we did a great job overall in trying to get the message across about the rich not caring about the poor. The difficulties I had would most probably be trying to get out of character quick enough to narrate, since I still found myself at times still being attached to who I was, as being the journalist. I also guess as a person it touches you and how sensitive you are to these things.

Another Brecht scene we had to do was from The Caucasian Chalk Circle where I played Grusha and Su yin played Simon. The Caucasian Circle was a play written by Brecht, it's two stories that come together in the end. Grusha, a kitchen maid, becomes engaged to a soldier named Simon. Soon thereafter, during the coup, she has Michael handed to her. She hides the child from the Fat Prince and his soldiers, thereby saving the child's life. In the caucasian circle the readers will notice that the characters names are very different and not what you would normally here nowadays, this was because some characters didn't even have proper names such as Fat Prince and was only named this way according to their rank and importance. People with more better names such as Grusha was most probably more important than the fat prince since she has an actual name instead of a description. We played the scene where Grusha has the baby and Simon finds out, we set the stage where I was on one side facing in a diagonal direction and the same for Simon on the other side, this way the audience will see we have no emotional connection and this to the audience would be obscure which is always a good thing, this way they would get more detached. Also while we were performing since we could not see eachother, we would portray how we felt through our gestures and also whenever we had to speak in third person we would walk up to the stage and narrate, since I was also the singer who was used to pass time and also sings the words as he narrates the story, whenever we narrated we would walk to the front and in the middle of the stage, to break character. I actually enjoyed doing this performance, it was easier for me to do than the first time, but at the same time there's always room for improvement and I think I could have memorized my lines more and made my gestures more bigger to show how I felt.