Political performance (Indulge the price game show) - Evaluation

Today we performed the final product of the past 7 weeks of workshops and devising to an audience of family members and several members of the Theatre Team. I believe this performance went very well. This is due to the response we received from the audience and what I saw while I wasn't participating. We conveyed the message of our piece clearly, highlighting poignantly the impact and destruction capitalism has on the moral values of the masses, who become base consumers and unsympathetic towards others due to their materialistic comfortability. The sections of Indulge that we presented all showed the impact of capitalism from a business perspective where we became a corporation looking to "re-brand" or customer image to guarantee  increased sales and positivity in a somewhat, amoral way.

 I believe our use of Brechtian techniques in these scenes where extremely well received by the audience. For example the use of multi-rolling and on stage actor changes further alienated the audience who were already staged in an un-naturalistic 'in the round' staging where they created 3 walls of audience that faced  a fourth wall of performers sat in their seats looking at them.

I believe one of the weakest things in our performance during rehearsal was our transitions. At the beginning of our full run through last week, they(transitions) were shocking. It took us 4 hours to run the entire piece which was our entire rehearsal time and we didn't even fully run our ending, we just blocked it and discussed what we needed to bring for the next week. Where as today we trimmed our piece down to 40 minuets with clean precises and formatted transitions that also used Brechtian skills to highlight what we learnt this term. For example characters would trade specific items that represented the character being multi-rolled, while on stage, to show the audience the role was now being played by someone else, and it also highlighted this whole performance was a construct and not reality (evidence of 'v-effect').
Specifically for me when I played the character of Agnes, Daisy who played it first after having walked into the performance space took out her red lipstick and wiped it all over her lips while facing the audience to show her transition into Agnes. When I went up I did exactly the same thing mirroring daisy in my application of the lipstick as if to clarify to the audience we are the same person just in different episodes of the same story. Episodes, another Brechtian technique I believe we used effectively to add flavour colour and meaning to our performance. The episodes were of different sections of the play Indulge and The Price, interspersed with witty and jovial games from the Austerity game show and devised sections of adverts positivis-ing the seven deadly sins and showing the impact and corruption money can have.
My section highlighted the corruption of the police force after horrendous cuts that were showed in the news that could lead to the MET having to get sponsors in order to keep afloat, we looked at the impact this would have on what police officer could and couldn't do if sponsored by a well known or contradictory company, we chose Durex and a situation where the CEO of Durex was caught up in a serious crime (rape) and how due to his position he got out of it due to the compromisation of the police. The scene used tickle tickle slap a technique used by Brecht and other political play makers to lull the audience in a false sense of security and then hit them with the hard fact of the situation. We did this through the slapstick characterisation of Michael and Grace, who played two paired PC's. I created a rhyme to introduce them that was kind of funny and upbeat "Who could it be? the paired PC's, here to protect the community. Possibly? Sponsored by Durex. The PC's then do a funny warm up where they in unison say "eye on the ball" several times while psyching themselves up for work. The audience are lead to feel comfortable here where they see two stereotypical police officer who are comedic. We then hit them with what the crime committed is (rape) and the laughing matter melts away, making the audience uncomfortable and questioning the piece.

I think moments such as these where prevalent throughout the entire play and thus successfully presented that we as a company learnt from what we had been taught about Brecht and clearly and effectively applied it to our political performance.

I believe the performance would've further benefited from being pushed further theatrically. Though we were all trying I don't believe we tried our very best at times projection for some was lack lustre and since Brecht always emphasised clarity large chunks of speech being lost into loud backing music or lost in the space due to poor projection would have meant our performance at points was not successful as it did not meet Brecht's criteria. Another point where our performance may have possibly lack clarity was our closing section, where we read  270 word obituary style add about ourselves to the audience. The concept was to sum up our entire lives in that small 270 words, but when doing it to the audience, some of us did rather short pieces instead of the 270words so they left the space to go get flowers much earlier than everyone else, this then made the message clouded or confusing. The person I spoke to looked very confused, listened but i don't think they fully understood the purpose behind the short section. In order to improve this I think we would've further discussed this section as a class and found ways to clearly imprint our message into our short break of monologues to present humanity and the worth of life over capitalism (consumerism and material products)

Rehearsals - Political Performance

Rehearsals

First Rehearsal
Our first official rehearsal for this performance was 10/11/12 where we sat and read through both scripts with everyone in the class reading in all the parts whenever they had an opportunity to. We then discussed the themes and message of each of the plays and Ben laid out some of his initial ideas. We also pitched ideas on what characters we wanted to be and what play we wanted to be in. I said I wanted to be in Indulge because to me the character of Agnes was appealing and I enjoyed the dry complicated humour of the piece and how unafraid the writing was in parodying the corporate world as this world of weird unemotional and manipulative people. Though the price was also extremely smart and interesting in the way it looked at rising prices and their knock on effect on the cost of living. We discussed the themes and found both of the plays looked at money, and then we discussed the current news and money. The previous week Ben had set us the homework of reading news papers and paying attention to the news so that we were ready to contribute to the lesson. And I did just that, and found a story about the austerity cuts and protests and how this was impacting eduction with grants no longer being grants but just loans. (this was later developed in one of our improvised pieces as the education section where we looked at how education, which is vital in today's world is being slowly turned into a business that doesn't aim to teach but just create debt and whether the debt is in fact worth the degree. Class became a very clear issue in access to resources in education and this was further developed when a group was assigned education austerity cuts as their stimuli for what turned out to be one of the clearest political messages we made in our piece.

Second Rehearsal

After the first rehearsal we all were sent messages to go pick up a script as sir had assigned us our roles and sections for both of the plays. I received Agnes, in the closing part of the play which I titled "Consumption crazy". I scripted the script by highlighting my lines and also googling words I didn't understand so I could get a handle on what my character was saying and how (picture of script). In this rehearsal we were given some time to get familiar with our lines so we could run through the scenes taking direction from Ben as he watched us perform. We performed with our scripts and I found this rehearsal extremely helpful as it aloud us to see the dynamics between all the characters in the play face to face. Where as when I was at home reading the lines a lot of the meaning was lost and tension that was clearly present when we actually put my section on its feet. There clearly was a lot of tension between Ingvar and Agnes, both characters were contrasting, Ingvar was very relaxed, passive and not with it where as Agnes was very present and aggressive and continually asserted her authority in this section. And Ben aided in directing this scene to be more energetic in order to show this relationship (between Ingvar and Agnes) and the characters we were playing and what corrupt cooperation's they were representing. There was a section where I shout "get ready for the storm RED!" and after that there is a quick fire idea brainstorm between the other characters on what the company could represent and Ben suggested that to make it more effective and clear of te status that my character had (and this was also visually effective) was to have me stand on the table just before I said this line with enthusiasm and energy. And then Daniel, Anna-maria and Kit would sit on the three sides of the table facing the audience (as we were working in the round) and we would do the remainder of the play there. This was extremely effective in portraying and creating a sort f cult-like atmosphere to the characters and the business. There we made a political and clear statement to our audience we showed the company as some sort of cult and Agnes was at the head of it. There is this section which then came afterwards, where we start talking crazy about god and man and the eight and the eighth sin ad we begin to chant about consumerism and sir encouraged me to go mad at this point with assertiveness and projection to further press this idea of consumerism and how it brain washes. This   I went through the script later and added notes and feedback from the lesson.

Brecht research

Theatre for Brecht was "a hammer to shape society" in his own words, Brecht attempts to present the "double nature of reality" where the audience are not meant to get comfortable. This video allowed me to understand the V-effect to a greater extent summarasing it as "to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar", also seeing in this video examples of v-effect techniques on stage eg having the stage personal on the stage, making sound effects in front of the audience, destroying all of the walls that would usually separate the audience and the action and instead allowing the audience to be the action through the challenging style of Brecht's Epic Theatre

Reseaarch into: Politics in Theatre

after watching this video I have a greater understanding of political theatre. It is clear that some writers intend to be political with the work they write and some just have underlying themes that highlight a political  issue or situation even slightly. I can now begin to understand that most theatre could definitely be considered as political. This was a helpful video that allowed me to see what actual modern play writes believed 'Political Theatre' could be.

Exclusion, Misrepresentation and Discrimination: Still Prevalent for Women in American Media and Politics - Student Pulse

Exclusion, Misrepresentation and Discrimination: Still Prevalent for Women in American Media and Politics - Student Pulse

FEMALES AND MISREPRESENTATION

From this very detailed article I fully understood with examples how women are misrepresented in the media. There is a lack of women who actually look like real women on TV in roles that everyday normal women take part in, women are stereotyped and made voiceless due to their gender and the immaturity of those who report news.
Women who are not feminine gain little highlight or space in the media. And I think that there could definitely be something we can play on during our protest, like preventing women from saying anything intellectual or pushing the idea that women care more about their looks and those who don't are "lesbians" or "extreme feminists" this idea of hyperbole language and labels could defo be used in our protest. eg. labelling the audience with how the media shows them to be even if they don't say something that conforms to the stereotype.  

Political Protest (further research)

We finally narrowed down what topic we would explore for our political protest. Misrepresentation of minority groups in the media. This was a topic which is still relevant and will continue being relevant till there is appropriate representation and a lack of bias in how news is told to the masses.Also this episode of Scandal staring Kerry Washington was ringing in my mind looked at representation of the main character by the American public "dog whistle politics" (Dog whistle politics usually refers to the use of certain code words or phrases that are designed to be understood by only a small section of the populace.)  and they showed a great biasd which was real and interesting and I was eager to find out more


basically the media is shown as getting away with using little words that if not magnified don't say anything to the general public but when the group targeted by the phrasing knows exactly what it means.

Research 

I conducted some research finding out what minority groups there were and how they weren't properly represented in the media eye. I tried t find evidence of the media actually misrepresenting groups that usually do not have a voice in public or who's voices are warped in order to coincide with an image or stereotype that society is used to seeing. 

Black males

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/media-misrepresents-black-men-effects-felt-real-world

After reading this article I found that:

 Lives of males in the US adversely affected by negative public perceptions 

Eg being turned from jobs

Police suspicion - a thing black males in Britain search they are 90% more likely to be stopped and searched and only 2% of those stops and searches lead to actual arrests or convictions 

Black males are seen as being aggressive or even beastly the article references what Michael Browns killer Police Officer Darren Wilson said about Michael Brown "“when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” even though the two men had the same height."

The article references a 2011 study *( http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/Media-Impact-onLives-of-Black-Men-and-Boys-OppAgenda.pdf )* on the impact of this misrepresentation "negative mass media portrayals were linked with lower life expectations among black men" helping to create barriers to the progression of black males within society and they also normalised these barriers as if they were natural or to be expected "inevitable" says the article.

The article gives a clear example of the median misrepresentation of the 1967 riots saying the reporting was inadequate and exaggerated. This calls back a memory of a post sir made on his blog that showed the same newspapers report of a protest outside parliament and how they were so contradictory and one was inflammatory and the other less so. 

At this stage I thought of several ideas for our performance possibly asking black people who'd walk past "trapping" or "leading" questions to get them to say something the media would frame them as so asking if a black student had a job and then their answer would probably be no  this would then push the idea black people are unemployed and that's a norm for them to be out of work, which is a common misconception of Black males shown in the media. The triggering or leading questions would be demoralising and negative for the person being questioned and those who'd see this would then understand this is how the median forceful Misrepresentation impacts young black males. This was slightly inspired by the article which did mention a negative impact on black males self-esteem due to the media representation which leads them on to "internalising the biases and stereotypes" and then perpetuate the misrepresentations.

I know understood further from this article that the plight of black males is strongly impacted by the media Misrepresentation  and have solid ideas for the questions to ask during our protest.

Another interesting article was done by the huffington post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darron-t-smith-phd/black-men-media_b_2844990.html

Women

Obviously prior to this research I was aware of a biased in how women are shown in movies film and other forms of the media. There has  always been the generic categorising of females with them either being the mother, the whore or the house wife and it has been hard for females to break away from these stereotypes and be more than just a pretty face without a voice. This is shown as women who are in high positions are often asked very superficial questions and shown in the media as the female stereotype or an outrage anarchist corrupting the minds of young children because they don't fit into societies already pre-described boxes.

Political Protest

Misrepresentation of Minorities in the Media.

The final topic we chose to do our protest on was misrepresentation of minorities in the media. The day we ended up doing our performance was several days after the attacks in Paris and it was a very tense time in the media on how they were portraying 'terrorist' assailants after this tragic event. This ended up impacting what we discussed. 

We chose to become the media and demoralise, label and categorise the students of the brit school in order to show in a clear way what the media does to minority groups.

Minority groups 

Minority group is a term referring to a category of people differentiated from the social majority, i.e. those who hold the majority of positions of social power in a society, and may be defined by law. Rather than a relational "social group", as the term would indicate, minority group refers to the above-described.

Research: Protest 10/11/15

Research for political protest
we had several ideas for the political protest
the first being police brutality
- Police brutalitity is a massive issue all over the world, but mostly in the United States of Americaa where police have a tendency to kill unarmed men and women and even several teenagers and young children. There were many police caused deaths in the past few years, with over 150 protests occuring in the wake of the deaths of people due to brute police force. The high profile killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson last August is what made me aware of this issue in the american police force, where police officers were murdering and slaughtering innocent people because they had a gun and badge.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michael-brown-shooting-ten-things-we-know-or-know-better-now-the-ferguson-grand-jurys-work-is-over-9881046.html 
Brown's killer was not charged with the murder and the case is not the only one like it, police have brutalised many American citizens and faced very minimal repercussions.

This topic was extremely emotive and current but then when brain storming how to stage it, the group decided we would not have enough time to it justice and another idea was bubbling on the surface of our general discussions about the media.
We realised that the media is biased, no outlet is innocent of choosing a side and presenting it. And then we looked at topics of discrimination and marginalisation and realised that the topic of "Media Misrepresentation" was current and affected all of us, so we went away and researched what it meant and evidence of it today. We focused soely on the misrepresention of margenalised groups in the media, for exaample black males, teenagers, women

Brecht vs Stanislavsky: Comparison

http://www.dreamdust.co.uk/work/compare/

The first Political lesson (Blog Post 3/11/15)

Political theatre

To educate, to present arguments, to create change,

what is political theatre?

Wikipedia suggests that 'Political Theatre' either makes a comment on political situations, is part of political action/protest, or protest that has a theatrical element to it.

Brecht

Bertolt Brecht aimed to alienate the audience which was the technique he is was most renown for,verfremdungseffekt, or the v-effect for short is a method used specifically by Brecht to alienate the audience in order to keep them awake and mentally engaged while watching his performances by attempting to ensure that the audience did not make emotional connections with the characters on stage but instead they would engage with the messages being presented in the performance . Brecht named his style of theatre "Epic Theatre" which aimed to cause action and entice discussion in the audience.

Melodrama and Stan were both going on but he found frustration, he didn't want the audience to forget that they were at the theatre, theatre was meant to make a change- a vice

Gestus

Gesture with attitude

•                    Firstly we worked on the communication of a message. Brecht emphasised the clarity of his messages in his plays, there were to be no misconceptions. To begin exploring this principal as a group we worked on communicating a message across the room to a partner.
This message was a nursery rhyme, which our partner had to guess. The difficulty of this task was everyone was doing their rhyme at the same exact time as their partner and others in the room. We all had to over exaggerate the gestures associated with our rhyme to our partner across the room to ensure that they got our message.
 The first attempt went horribly my partner didn't guess my nursery rhyme. Then the stakes on the second attempt were raised, Ben said that if our partner didn't know what our poem was we would "die". This attempt went so much better, me and Kai took more time to ensure that our message was clearly received by each other by exaggerating our gestures and singing louder. Impact- this allowed me to understand the importance of clarity because without the message there is no reason behind my action and so no point in me performing

•                    Secondly we then watched and created a story about soldiers involving the whole class where 6 of us volunteered to be the actors, and the rest of us, along with sir, directed their actions to tell a story and then created a political statement about our story. We used the gesture of the salute as our starting point where we had Michael salute the other five boys on stage. To create a political statement we then added to this action, such as adding a threat to the gesture of the salute making it 'gestus' and not just gesture. We then work-shopped this to find clearer meaning which resulted in several different meanings with the salute then being a death signal and not just a symbol of authority. The boys all marched into the space Michael saluted them one by one and they fell to the ground as if dead then he climbed over their bodies to the centre where he then saluted the audience, and the statement became extremely clear, we were addressing the issue of death in war, and the status difference between those who are sent to certain death and those who are sure to survive.

•                   We then split into groups of 8, and Ben gave us all polar opposite ideas to explore. My group received  "popular and unpopular" and we had to show two scenes that represented these two opposing words. We  chose opinions on drinking and the popular opinion which is that it's fun to drink at parties and we showed this by behaving in a rowdy manner and laughing with something in our hands, then raising our hands up in the air and cheering with large false smiles as our gesture, we held this for 3 seconds and one by one we split off into showing the nasty effects of alcohol which was domestic abuse and limited inhibitions and vulnerability, our main gesture for this was a fake slap which forced the girls to fall to the ground grabbing the side of the face they were slapped on, with the hand they held their drink with. I believe this was a very effective exercise in allowing us to explore the impact of gesture 

•                    Thirdly, gesture we created gestus of teenagers as a group in a circle,  began shrugging shoulders high and then we exaggerated it like marionettes then I went into the middle and made it look like I was controlling him, change again workshop I said "I am society" now THERRES a political statement

Discussion

•             Fourth, we were then given/ shown one card from a Deck of cards, this was to be our status, 1 being low, 'Q' being very high, then we walked around as this character in the status level of our cards gesturing, then acknowledging others, then shacking hands, as if we were this status level. I quickly began to notice we were changing ourselves when greeting people of different status so I received status level 3 and i walked timidly and looked down a lot and when greeting someone I would avoid eye contact. But when I came across someone also looking lowly I nodded in their direction as if showing solidarity in status and those who seemed above me rarely looked in my direction and I was hesitant to offer them my hand in fear of humiliation, the status relationship was very clear.

•             (Continued) We then stood in the room in a curved line, and either ends of the line walked into the middle and greeted each other in the status they were given, interaction was very interesting to watch as an audience member the things I noticed when walking became very clear and obvious that we all adopted certain gestures and body language in order to amplify our characters status so the audience could identify it.  then some were workshopped by being given a placard(Brechtian technique) which described the person holding it without changing gestus further meaning added to piece, even some irony, humour and honesty, engaging the audience in thought about character

•             Fifth task, stood in the room and were given in 3s emotions or words to gesture to eg love, distrust, anger, intimidation, shock, regret, went on to pick three of those, my group picked intimidation, love and regret  and we were asked to either add a political message to the piece, or a narrative that joined the 3 images in a clear but not necessarily linear way, use of narration was suggested. My group chose the narrative of a girl who liked a boy who was popular and didn't like her back and she talks to him is rejected and regrets it, we showed love with large gestures

And then for intimidation (narrated in first person throughout) Sybil and Daniel stood in aggressive stances glaring at me when I approached, and I narrated my actions (reminding the audience this wasn't real but just a story) I reported my speech and Daniels but he spoke gesturing largely when I indicated him in the story saying "get lost" accompanied with an insensitive gesture which later in feedback we discussed how it captured who his character was, quickly and clearly, without the lengths of development that naturalism goes into

-6th final task of the day before discussing what we were to do in our political protest groups we devised a piece where we were given a group of people eg my group got journalists and we had to create a piece where we explored the stereotype in a Brechtian way. My group chose to show the negatives of the media and journalists and how brutal they are when asking questions to victims, referring to them as quite literally human vultures, we shoved our hands in the face of the person being questioned constantly is if they were our questioning mics and we kept overlapping each other in our thirst for a story, picking at the interviewees clothes, and then when we heard that the person we were questioning was no longer relevant we left him alone after damaging him we all just lost interest, showing brutality of media, through feedback the overlapping and acknowledging the audience as spectators was effective, but we needed to improve by ending in unison as some of us walked away and some of us stayed in the scene trying to get another story.