Epic Theatre

Bertolt Brecht

Epic Theatre 

What is so Epic about Epic Theatre?

In the lesson we did several discoveries about Epic theatre:

Gestus is a defining part of Brecht's work, Gestus can be defined as gestures with emotion and or intention. There is no subtle thing about gestus, it's not about naturalism anymore (bye bye Stanislavski) but about the obviousness of the movement and imaginative uses of gesture. We experimented with this idea of gestus by doing different tasks. 
Statues 
So what would change if we were given these different stimuli?

Romeo and Juliet?                                    Hero? 

We were given several stimuli to adopt a pose and to observe how our physicality changed.The image of the hero shows a man, with a high chest, hands on hips and a chin facing upwards. Almost everyone in the company adopted this pose or something similar. This allowed us to experiment with gestus first and got us to understand the theory before executing it within performance. Romeo and Juliet with a partner again had Romeo on his Knees and Juliet almost fainting at the sight of him. This other example let us explore how gestus can be used through two people and is wildly interesting to watch and observe. 

Another example that we explored was the Nursery rhyme task. You guess the other person's nursery rhyme while they are trying to guess yours at the same time. Mine was "Wind the bobbin up" and my partner's was - well I couldn't guess it....? So when we did it the second time she and I both exaggerated our moves in order for us to both get each other's. And the second time it worked and I got her's which was "Mary had a little lamb". By doing this task it allowed my to understand how exaggerated you have to be in order for people to understand what you are trying to portray. 

Stanislavski is this man that is all about naturalism and finding the inner character. Bretch is like "no thanks let's challenge that!" He wants to make you think about what you are watching. 

The V Effect! 

Bretch wants you to question what you are watching! He wants you to think and judge what you are watching, Political theatre is all about debate and controversy. The V effect separates you from the performance, rather than watching the play you are involved with in it and leave with a debate or message. In one of Brecht's Essays he wrote this 

"playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious"

Brecht really wants the audience to not just watch but to think. The power of theatre is so strong why not use it? A normal play doesn't challenge it hides you away from the true message it is trying to portray. 

Different forms of the V effect are: Placards, narration (breaking the forth wall), song, snapping out of character and gestus. Each one of these will allow you to be different and in our Performance Workshop it will be interesting to see how we can use these to portray our message.

To take this idea of the V effect into practice we did the contrast of two people who are politicians. One was a believable politician and the a fake politician - it was hard to show the huge difference in both of them without being too sarcastic. Getting the two mixed up is actually quite easy...surprisingly! To be obviously distrusting I put a very creepy fake smile on and said one sentence saying "I will defiantly not keep to my policies" and had several people applauding and fainting around me. The other had just one person shaking the other's hand; this to me wasn't obvious enough that they were trustful enough, if they had maybe had a placard saying the truth it would mean a lot more and be obvious to the audience and given a bigger statement. 

Slap and tickle is used to shock the audience. For example you could humour the audience and make the performance very amusing however you can then change the tone of the performance to be really serious. So you tickle the audience with some humour or a light topic and then you slap them right in the face with a dark and horrifying topic - this huge juxtaposition makes you think and hits you right in the face and makes you see the topic almost more serious than you would usually would see it. 

Over the lesson by looking at these different task you can understand the different ways in order to shock the audience. Bretch as a practitioner is trying to make you discuss the performance and make you question what you are watching.

Yet another example In another task there was an element of song involved - we used the classic Brittany Spears, a dash of Abba and to top it all off we added the Rolling Stones. It was rather effective using these songs, people were more interested because they recognised the songs and watched the performance and listened to what was being said more, this I found was very effective - note to self! Song is very useful!