Final Major Projects

Brecht believed that theatre should not only reflect society but change it, unlike the naturalistic style which is immersive and psychological developed by Stanislavski. Brecht’s form of theatre is called epic theatre and takes a lot of inspiration from styles like cabaret, Elizabethan plays and new technologies with light and sound which were only just being developed in his lifetime. There are many techniques used in both which are a direct contrast to each other some of which we used and some we didn't in our performance. When naturalistic theatre was at its height Brecht decided to use his theatre technique for a force for change. He wanted to make his audience think and famously said that theatre audience at that time “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.  In  naturalistic  or  dramatic theatre  the audience cares about the lives of the characters onstage. They forget their own lives for a while and escape into the lives of others. B...

While also using our own personal experiences and the Stanislavski method of using our own emotional memories to become a character we also researched facts and stories from rape servivours. Even though Brecht teaches not to become charactered but to display the chracter it was really hard for us to that with a topic that is very directly connected to ourselves. We took a very logical approach which I think shows in our performance as we didn't have the main story for the audience to follow and it took away the emotional investment for the audience. We found a lot of shocking facts and statistics that we used in one of the scenes. .12000 men in the UK are raped every year. .Only 5.7 of cases that go to court end in a conviction. .1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted after the age of 16. .In 80% of cases the offender knows the victim. .5 out of 6 victims did not report their experience to the police. https://www.ons.gov.uk...

-Ruth and Elliot before the show rehearsing.) During the technical rehearsal, we had notes on how we could improve our performance, one of the big comment we got was how we chose to work in the round. Even though most of the audience could see the performance there were some parts where the round did not quite work for example the monologue spoken by Courtney could have been done more effectively by slowly roaring the scene so everyone saw both sides of the sheet. Also, the opening with the tea and chairs, a lot of it is performed more forward and if we could go back and change it I think we could have set the chairs up in the corners of the stage rather than in a straight line. However, we made a group decision not to change the performance last minute because of the quality if the performance would be affected because we had practiced it one way for so long. One note I had was the movement with Elliot could be a lot smoother and the next day we did improve on this. We decided to s...

We had music throughout the piece to change the atmosphere between scenes but to also have all of them connected in someway. With all the scenes being separate from each other the use of music throughout the repetition of some of the songs made the piece flow better for the audience. Brecht uses song and the use of music remind the audience that they are watching a play sometime the music is in contrast to the scene with distances the audience even more. Unlike naturalism, our music choices couldn't be historically accurate because or show didn't have a time period or a place it was set. Most of the music we used was about love or they were sensual sings that the audience associated with romance which contrasted about the topic of rape. The beginning song we used whas “toothpaste kisses” by the Maccabees, it's the same song that is used in the video we found about physical theatre and World War We all really loved this song and with the begin being odd and not suggestin...

One of the first things we decided was to perform on the round, this was to give an intimate feel to the show but also make the audience feel apart of the performance. We wanted a challenge and the idea of the audience being so close to the scared and excited us. Being in the round got rid of a safety barrier that we are used to having like having wings or a backstage. A lot of the shows we do the audience is distant we don't get to see their faces but with our show, we can see everyone. Something that we could have done better was some of the blocking of the scenes even though we tried and most of the show was performed well in the round there was some like the opening and the poem where it was still performed very frontal. We didn't have time to change this but if we had more time we would have directed the opening and change some of the movement to be more suitable for in the round. Our set was very minimalistic and authentic. Brecht believed that the use of probes should b...

The rehearsal process started when we had decided the topic of our piece, being in a group of 5 girls a topic close to all out hearts was sex education and the topic of consent. We spoke about our own experiences in confidence with each other, even though this wasn’t exactly easy we all trust and now each other well enough to be open with the situation.  The first thing we did was plan out the scenes we wanted to have in the performance, with the topic being consent we didn’t want to go down the route of what has been done before. We steered away from a singular timeline with set characters instead our show was a montage, a collection of scenes that are contrasting but have our theme and style throughout so the piece still flowed well for the audience. Brecht had this idea by taking it from silent film, this allows the audience to focus on the topic rather than being lost in the story or characters. We were very aware that we didn't want characters with names or stories that the a...

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 in pre world war 1 Germany, he was a sickly child and started writing poetry at a very young age. While at school he met Caspar Neher who became a good friend and in later life he designed visual iconography that would uniquely identify the epic theatre. The war broke out when he was 16, to avoid being drafted for the front lines he enrolled as a medical student at Munich University. While attending he spent most of his time going to drama classes and continuing to write poetry. After the war he watched the slow rise of the Third Reich growing up in this time must have been difficult for Brecht due to inflammation the cost of food skyrocketed and most of the population would have been starving. As the Nazi party rose to power Brecht continued to write poetry and plays with his first play ‘BAAL’ being published and performed in 1923, it celebrated life and sexuality, it has later been produced many times over the most recognizable by the BBC in 1982 with ...