On the week back with Rob, Rob made us watch a Documentary to help further our understanding and history of Brecht. Rob hoped that watching the documentary would help us as actors have a clearer reason as to why we want to become actors.
I managed to take notes.
Notes taken from Documentary we watched:
• There were those who chose to explore the landscape of society and those that explored the landscape of the soul. Brecht explored the landscape of society
• Brechts' energy was directed outwards towards politics and institutions, seeking to change society and theatre
• Samuel Beckett explored memory and the meaning of existence
• Becketts' work had no effective purpose it simply 'is'.
• Brecht and Bechet created a new language of theatre, inspiring a generation of writers.
• Brecht lived the last part of his life in East Berlin
• Brecht's house is a museum commemorated to preserve the memory of his life and works
• By the age of 30, Brecht was successful, notorious and a communist
• Brecht wanted his audience to react to scenes on stage as if they was at a boxing match. He wanted the audience to think and analyse and of course take side. Above all he wanted clarity
• A play he wrote, Mother Courage who was played by his wife, is about a small time profiteer living on the small pickings of war, it analyses what was going to happen in Germany
• Brecht liked to follow small intimate scenes with big public ones, jumping notions, spanning decay simply by telling the audience what was happening
• He wanted his plays to reveal the social reality of characters and situation and to criticise the politics of the day.
• Brecht is known as a theorist about theatre, his theory of alienation meant that audiences were not to be alienated but they were made to look at familiar things in a fresh but accurate standpoint
• In 1933 the Reichstag gave Hitler the opportunity to eliminate his opponents causing Brecht to flee the country. He moved with his family to Denmark, Finland the Russia. In May 1941 they stayed in California.
• Brecht enjoyed America, something he had fantasised about whereas Beckett thought the people was strange
• While in America, Brecht worked on his play Galelao with English actor Charles Law
• The questions actors asked in Beckett's plays were: "why am I doing this?" "Where have I come from?", to which he had no answer to the questions about the characters offstage lives because he didn't believe the characters offstage lives existed. • Beckett licenced the British theatre to dispense with naturalism; to allow it's potential metatheatrical to breathe.
• Brecht encouraged the theatre to inject realism into productions of Shakespeare, the classics and of contemporary plays and to be ambitious about form and content. A play could be whatever you wanted it to be.
• Brechts style of Epic Theatre was reborn in Britain when playwrights like Edward Bond discovered it's roots lay in Shakespeare
• The permanent legacy of Brecht and Beckett was that now as in all the arts there was no hierarchy of form. You can use whatever necessary to say what you want to say. It's a world as Beckett suggested where "anything is possible".
After the documentary, Rob then went over the assignment with us.
We're going to be rehearsing scenes from Brecht's play 'Fear and Misery of the Third Reich'. It is a very good play that shows Brecht's approach to theatre which was very diatetic. It contains a variety of short scenes that show how different families and peoples lives were affected during the the rise of Nazism and Hitler. This play will hopefully help us as actors gain an appreciation and understanding of the style of Brecht.
To help us prepare for the style of Brecht, in the morning in the theatre Rob instructed us to do a variety of exercises in which we are to just show us doing or being something. We all had a partner and we had to be a cat and mouse, Romeo and Juliet, poor and rich.
Afterwards with our partner we stood in two lines opposite one another on the other side of the stage and we had to pick a nursery rhyme and then had to shout at our partners our nursery rhyme with a dire need that we wanted to be heard. As everyone was doing this, it sounded like a riot so you really had to shout loud enough just to hear yourself.
These exercises reflected and compared Brecht's theories in which he studied the social landscape of society and politics while Stanislavsky studied the landscape of the soul. Brecht's style of theatre while acting is more demonstrating (the exercises where we became something) and getting your point across (the exercises of shouting our nursery rhymes and also the first exercise where we were to show who was who). Brecht believed that character and actor was not to become one; there is no need to understand the background of the character; you are to just play/represent the character, while Stanislavsky believed the character and actor was to become one; you need to understand the psychological subject.
However we are not to misjudge Brecht's theories with it being non-emotional, the actor should not be connected emotionally, and mentally with the character, but to the audience who can see the characters situation and circumstances can empathise with the character but always remember they are to think outside the theatrical box that theatre is not for entertainment but for reflection and change. Example Brecht's play Mother Courage, when the mother loses her children, the audience is able to empathise with her loss but have to ask why she lost her children? It is the result of the war. How are we to stop the war? Brecht intended for his plays to have a knock on effect with the audience of always questioning and trying to find answers even after you've left the theatre.
Rob then made a statement and then asked us what we thought it meant:
Art is not the mirror to reflect society, but a hammer in which to shape it.
Some comments from the class -
Tutu: I don't know.
Christina: it's more to change peoples views on the way things are going.
Gifty: it's like Nade Bansky. His art isn't pretty art to look at, his art is for you to look at it and think. It's made to change your perspective.
Rob expanded and said He uses a juxtaposition of images and that's what Brecht does with theatre.
Francis: a lot of people go and see stuff to get away from reality, to laugh at, just to get away from their own un-comfort with their reality, what we put on stage is how we interpret and make us have our own opinion not have someone else's opinions forced on us.
Jade: it's a wake up call. You're shaping your society, you're shaping what's around you today. Don't just look at it and let it go pass you, take it in and shape your own future. We're the only people that can change society otherwise we're gonna be accepting with how society is.
Abigail: I just want to reflect on Francis and Jade's point - art is not a mirror, we see things differently.
Rob then said we aren't in a vacuum, we're all shaped by what goes on.
Sam: it can mean what Francis was saying, or it can mean to send a message out to everyone what we feel is wrong politically but there is no right or wrong. Rob then argued that Brecht would argue that there is a right or wrong depending where you are politically.
Akele: the mirror is basically yourself, I think it empowers you and what can you do with that. I think it is how you think and how it affects the world.
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