Lesson 2: Initial Protest Rehearsals and Brechtian technique

This lesson we formed our groups for our performance protests and began working on some initial ideas. After discussing what we felt were current topics and what could be protested against successfully, we settled on the maltreatment of mentally ill prisoners.

We came up with a narrative and assigned ourselves characters. Each of us were decided on a mental illness that we would do some research into, meaning we would have a wide range of mental illness being covered. Benji decided that he would play the guard, so instead he did research into the lack of experience and training for the guards relating to mental illness in particular. I decided to research anorexia and bulimia in prisons, as it is a topic close to my heart and I felt I could become impassioned during a performance related to this, while also being able to find sufficient information.

Our structure was originally a lot less rigid, we were going to focus on character development and then let a scene develop through improvisation with a few key rehearsed moments. One of these key moments was the opening, in which we all lined up to receive medication, and it is discovered there is not enough to treat everyone. Another key moment was when I became aggressive towards Benji and he gets violent, hitting my head against the table. We did not rehearse any more than this in the first lesson.

After this, we performed our initial protest ideas to each half of the year to get feedback and to test our ideas. From this, we discovered that far more people were engaged to our rehearsed scenes, as they were bold and eye catching as opposed to nuanced work that requires attention, which is something our improvised work leant more towards. In an environment like this, where a lot of information has to be portrayed quickly and in a short space of time due to a short attention span from the audience, it is more beneficial to use more rehearsed movement as it is more likely to hold the audience’s attention.

Brechtian Technique

In the afternoon, we worked as an entire year group to start to play with some Brechtian techniques.

The first exercise we explored was Verfremdungseffekt, Which is the idea of defamilarisation or alienation from a character - it means strange-making.

We explored this by walking around the room and then getting into groups of a certain number when told, creating an inanimate object from our bodies. When we finished, we were then told an emotion and had to somehow distort our creation so that the object projected that emotion. This disassociates the surroundings from the idea that they have to be just that - the surroundings. It is possible to take anything in a Brechtian play and present it with life, distancing it form its original or real-life purpose.

In the second part of the lesson, we continued to walk the room and were given simple adjustments to our body stance, be that by leading with a certain body part or repositioning ourselves to walk in a particular way. What was important was that they were only physical instructions, making it so any character decisions were entirely created by the performer and what the new body positions mean to them in terms of character. This led to the formation of stereotype and very caricature-like personalities, something much associated with Brecht's style. This exercise was useful as it taught us the importance of bold, lucid characters in Brechtian acting, as there is often fast pace changing of character's in Brecht so it is vital that there is a clear distinction between different personalities.