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.