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.