Brecht: Part 1

Our practitioner for the next three weeks in our lessons with Miss Starbuck is Bertolt Brecht. Brecht is one of the most influential practitioners in theatre in the 20th century where his main idea was to distance the audience from the piece and to constantly remind them that they were watching a piece of theatre and not a real life situation. He wanted to create a social or political message in each of his works as well as incorporating songs, dance, and breaking the fourth wall through dispassionate commentary and by addressing the audience directly, all to remind the audience that they are watching a piece of theatre. Brecht also used guestus where an actor creates a stereotype of a character.

 

We had to create a Brechtian performance using the above criteria creating two to three different scenes based on this. Brecht often used the news in different situations; for example one Brechtian performance included Hitler's rise to power but based around the vegetable stock market.

In groups, we used current newspapers to decide on a topic that interested us, and could also be manipulated into a Brechtian style. For our topic, my group chose climate change, due to recent events such as Hurricane Irma and Donald Trump's reluctance to accept the changing climate and his insensitivity to people affected. We also wanted to explore other people's reactions to climate change and to Hurricane Irma.

Initially, we assigned each member of our group as a type of weather (sun, rain, wind, snow, storm) and attempted to personify them as though they were 'people'. This would remind the audience that they were watching a performance, as well as bringing in guestus as the weather was stereotyped, for example, the sun was joyous. Instead of this, however, we decided that two types of weather should be changed into news presenters and keep the weather types sun, rain, and wind, as they are traditional types of weather. At the moment, we have minimal multi-role, with Issy the only actor to have two roles, but we will try to incorporate more of this into the piece.

We then tried to make our idea into three scenes that would try and get our main point across, without being too obvious, in order to make the audience leave thinking about what they have seen, another Brechtian technique. We tried to sandwich the 'serious' part of the performance in-between less serious parts that could be regarded as comedic, such as adding in an over-the-top caricature of Trump and making the personification of the weather extreme.

We created the first scene with ease, using the initial characters mentioned above and exaggerating them to remind the audience that this was simply a piece of theatre. We decided that there should be a world map projected onto the floor, so that actors playing the weather could do so over the area of the map that they are most prominent. For example, the sun would be mainly over the equator, particularly around areas of desert. This projection would be in the centre of the 'stage' and aforementioned news presenters would be off the map off stage left. When we performed this section back, it was brought up that the news presenters seemed to not be part of the scene, we could place them on the map, maybe where the most weather 'damage' would occur.

In addition to the first scene, we suggested that the news presenters should comment on one of the audience members. This would break the fourth wall, a Brechtian technique, and cause interaction with the audience. This would again remind the audience that they're watching a piece of theatre and not something that is real.

For clothing choices, we have decided to go for something simple, such as we will all wear black trousers/leggings. We initially decided that each weather should wear a different coloured shirt, but as not all the actors are weather, we may have to adapt this idea in later sessions. This was supposed to represent that climate change is something that different people have different opinions on, hence the different coloured shirts. This would also switch characters easily without the need to change costume. To aid this, we could use placards with our character's names on (another Brechtian technique) which would highlight what role we would be playing.

During the mini performance, I felt that we didn't all know what we were doing, possibly due to slight lack of communication, or we didn't know what lines to say, which may have negatively impacted the overall effect. Although, we all exaggerated our characters; for example, because I was the wind, my movements were large but fluid, something which I think got across to the audience.

In sessions to come, we will hopefully make more scenes and improve on the scene that we made int he first Brecht based session. We will also try to incorporate more Brechtian techniques such as dispassionate commentary and use more media such as news videos about climate change.