03.03.2020 - Contemporary Theatre Research - Mr Lemon

BRECHT

Our group has been reduced to just Amelie and I.  We have decided to do a Brecht play possibly as we will be able to do a lot of research on the context.  We haven't done any Brecht work as well, so we want to do something new.

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
The first play we looked at was Mother Courage and her Children which is about a woman with her three children who try to trade with soldiers to profit off of the war.  All her 3 children die throughout the play due to the war.  We looked through the script to find a place where there is a duologue and found that within pages 64-76, there were a few.

WAITING FOR GODOT
page 36

Monologues in the style of different practitioners - Mrs Williams

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These are three videos of the same monologue but performed in different styles from different practitioners.  We had to take inspiration from this and do a monologue that we had memorised in the style of a practitioner.

My monologue was Protecto (Kid Hero) by D. M. Larson.  When I first performed this monolgue, I did lots of direct audience address throughout the piece which could be related to Brecht.  When I changed it to do it in the style of a different practitioner, I chose Stanislavski.  I wanted my piece to be more naturalistic so i used my own experiences from being a child and gave myself units and objectives to follow.  Instead of direct audience address, I spoke to the teddy bear on the bed.  I found this exercise quite interesting because based on the practitioner, the play can be given a whole new meaning.

Practitioners - Mrs Williams

STANISLAVSKI

• Emotion memory - reliving experience (made actors go mad as it was too traumatic)
• Units and objectives - super-objectives (whole play), through-line (smaller objectives)
• Actioning - if there is a line of text that's not coming across as real, add an action to make it real

STRASBERG

• Changed emotion memory to sense memory - thinking about senses rather than actual experience so actors don't go mad

BRECHT

• 1896-1956
• Grew up in Nazi Germany
• Called out propaganda and got exiled
• Berliner Ensemble
• Three Penny Opera
• Caucasian Chalk Circle
• Good Woman
• Didactic theatre - teaching, to change society
• Epic theatre - alienation, V-effect - turn off audience's emotions but turn on their brain
• "What there is shall go to those that are good for it"
• Characters talk in 3rd person and use direct audience address

PUNCHDRUNK

• Theatre group in Britain
• Started in 2000
• Founded by Felix Barrett
• Promenade theatre - walking
• Site specific - the place is the stimulus - graveyard, school, forest

ARTAUD

• Theatre of cruelty
• 1896-1948
• Known work - The Theatre and It's Double
• Went to Paris in 20s and met the Surrealists
• Acted in a couple of films
• Surrealists rejected him
• 1926-1928 - co-ran Theatre Alfred Jarry - producing work by August Strindberg
• 'The Cenci' - incest heavy
• 1938 - The Theatre and It's Double - surrealism, symbolism
• Psychological and human stagnation - restore theatre to its original destiny - fused together dance, song, pantomime in a perspective of hallucination and fear
• Theatre of cruelty - "in which violent physical images crush and hypnotise the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as a whirlwind of higher forces"

BOAL

• Brazilian
• Forum theatre, invisible theatre and image theatre
• Forum - bringing people from audience to fix scene and make it better
• Invisible - scene with actions protagonist would like to try in real life, potential real life situations
• Image - short scenes, 1-2 minutes, strong imagery

BERKOFF

• 1937 East London, Jewish
• Extreme physicality is used to make sense of the poetic language
• Uses iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets etc.
• Flowing poetic but horrible scenes
• Uses experiences

FRANTIC ASSEMBLY

• Founded 1994
• Work reflects contemporary culture
• Non-naturalistic
• Combines movement, design, music and text
• Frantic method - direction through movement and physical awareness can be implemented in moments of stillness - physical theatre