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.