Further work on presentations 8/12/16

Run through of second half of Mother Courage - 6/12/16

My character is only in one section of a scene in the second half, then I am the third soldier for scene 11 so I wasn't really needed much today. With the spare time I had, I took it upon myself to continue to write music for my song in the play, which I was told need to be quite rocky and up beat, because it will contrast against the horrible lyrics which will bring out comedy. I came up a classic blues riff in E minor, and then the way I sing/talk in tune will be the main element that brings out the Comedy. I also made sure that I sing with the voice I use for Eilif, which I have now decided will be an english accent but with a slight northern tweak to it. I found this quite hard because I have never really sung with an accent before, and singing and playing this song at the same time is hard anyway because of the strumming pattern, let alone doing it with an accent.

Scene 8 - this is the scene where find out that Eilif murdered the farmer's wife and he is being taken to be executed; here I play Eilif very fed up and angry with everyone because he could possibly be annoyed and angry that he got charged in the first place, showing that his egotistical side thinks he can do whatever he wants and get way with it, so when he doesn't he is obviously going to be angry. To portray this, in terms of Brechtian techniques I think I need be more over the top and possibly be louder and more full on in terms of reactions and speaking to people. I am finding applying Brechtian techniques to performances very hard because I prefer the serious and naturalist drama, whereas epic theatre is very over the top and unnatural, so applying these techniques is a challenge for me.

Scene 11 - Although it went a lot better than the last run of this scene, I still think there is a lot of room for improvement; the comedy is only portrayed when all the lines sound normal and are conversational, with a quick consistent flow from start to finish, so when  we do stop completely for comedic effect (like when the farmer says about chopping trees) it is more obvious and it makes it all the more funnier. Also, the more normal the dialogue sounds, the funnier it will be and in terms of Brechtirian techniques, it will trick the audience into think everything is normal so they will be more suspect to laugh, and then so when Kattrin dies at the end of the scene, the audience really get that shock feeling of  "we really shouldn't have laughed", that realisation of what they have just watched. I think we all need to work on our movements and physicality, and the use of the stage space because for the majority of the scene, the soldiers are on one side of the stage (stage left) and the farmer's family are primarily stage right, leaving a huge gap in the middle of the stage and we end up blocking each other and from an audience visual, it just looks odd. We need to move around the stage a lot more and integrate more, and add a lot more energy and constant pace to improve the scene as a whole.

Presenting and watching Brecht question presentations 1/12/16

Whilst watching the other presentations, we came to a discussion centred around the question 'would you rather watch a Brecht play or be in a Brecht play'; my response to this was I'd rather be in a Brecht play because if I was watching it, I'd get quite bored because I wouldn't understand what is going on because Brecht's style of dialogue is very jumbled and hard to understand because of his lack of emotion inducted in the scenes and dialogue which takes away the emotional attachment of the characters to focus on the message he tries to convey with the play, and I as an audience prefer to have some sort of emotional attachment to a character or characters to be able to be more interested in the performance. If I was in the play, I can pick the play apart and analyse it and fully understand it - both the story and the characters - and thus becomes more enjoyable for me. For example, when we started Mother Courage, I really didn't like it because I couldn't understand it at all, but once we started to analyse it and take it apart, I began to take a liking to it.