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6^th November 2012

In today’s lesson we explored the Brecht style of acting, and some of the techniques that he uses when putting on a production. We did exercises that explore the use of Gestus, exaggeration, narration and verfremdungseffekt. These exercises all explored the ideas behind Brechtian acting, for example: we looked at the use of stereotypes, narrators and disconnecting ourselves as actors from the characters and learning how to represent them but not be them.

This lesson helped me to learn and understand more about epic theatre and to understand how to get into the mindset of an epic theatre actor. I learnt more about how to alienate the actors and the audience from the characters and to make sure that they know that what they are seeing on stage isn’t real but a piece of fiction being shown to reflect society and political issues. I learnt that epic theatre is more about what it is trying to say to the audience rather than creating a different world from the audience, this is why narration and verfremdungseffekt is used, so that the fourth wall is broken down and the audience are aware that a message is trying to get across to them. Also for the actors using narration and having to play more than one character helped me to understand more about epic theatre and about Brecht’s style of acting because it made me become less attached and connected to the one character as I couldn’t become them because I would have to step out of that character into another one in a fluid movement, without having time to connect or get into the mindset of that character, so by using techniques such as gestus really helped me to understand how gestures and attitudes can portray a character without having to be them.

I found Brechtian theatre at first to be unnatural and slightly strange, as when I normally act or approach a character I find that I want to connect with them, I want to be able to understand them and I find that my view of good, strong acting is when I see someone and I don’t think of them as the actor but as the character and I am absorbed into the world that is being shown to me and the massage should be shown that way. So when I came to approaching characters and the exercises that we had to do, I found that a lot of them felt forced or unnatural for me, especially when we had to do the verfremdungseffekt exercise and had to take a very serious subject and make it strange by saying the stage directions. I found that it didn’t feel right when I was acting it because suddenly I felt disconnected from the character. However the more exercises that I did I could see and start to understand why Brecht would want to alienate the audience and the actors from the characters as he felt the message of the piece of theatre was more important and that the audience should leave the theatre with something to think about. This is why Brecht and the political theatre goes so well together because it is about the message and trying to effect the audience and make  a change in the world through the use of theatre, which is something that I think is very important in theatre and I believe that theatre and the arts can be very powerful and have a large effect on the world and current issues.