7/11/17- Theatre Workshop lesson

What we did class:

Brecht "the artist never acts as if there is a 4th wall besides the 3 surrounding them, he expresses his awareness of being watched, the audience can no longer have the illusion on being the unseen spectator at the event."
- see it as life not a performance, we are never pretending to be someone else, we always know who or what we're playing, Try demonstrating this in rehearsals to get used to the idea of this concept, so we are aware that there is no illusion, we can talk to our audience, as there is no 4th wall so we don't have to pretend there is. Therefor following Brecht's vision and what he believes, he doesn't like big shiny props wants everything to be real life.  So the audience will no longer have that safety net to be in the dark and just observe but now they have to work just as hard as the actors do.

actors performing in Brechts play usually take on more then one character, so characters need to be easily defined and recognisable, Brecht's actors explore different postures and ways of moving to create bold physical characters. in making these bold choices actors are making a social and political comment about a character and their place in the social structure of society, he didn't believe in a class list society no rich or poor. 

We done an exercise where we created different characters using exaggerated gestures and physicality the different characters are either rich (upper class) or poor (lower class) some of these characters were:

• someone who sticks their nose up and bum like a string is pulling the nose and butt while also being clenched while also holding a glass of wine  -upper class 
• A character who puffs out their chests and is smoking a fat cigar -upper class
• A lady whose leading with her pouted lips in one hand shes holding a designer handbag, she was holding a dog on the other hand -upper class
• This character is a women who is pregnant with a baby, she is very slouched smoking in one hand 
• Another character is one who wants drugs, they'll do anything for it, they're very itchy and closed in.
• A proper lads lad with a massive beer belly

We then saw these characters interact with eachother the rich and poor the setting was the horse racing. 

This exercise allowed us to see that the way we see rich and poor is different to everyone. Also how exaggerated gestures do work in the scene and can sometimes make it effective and funny.