Exploring or Exploiting Brecht ?

To begin our adventure into the realm of Brechtian theatre we started off with a varirety of tasks and games to allow our minds to become developed and open to Brechts form of theatre.

Challenge 1 - We beagn by getting a partner and standing on opposite sides of the room and shouting out a nursery rhyme of our choice. We asked if our partner could hear us and none of them could we then had to help our partner in understanding by enhancing our communication by adding physical gestures that they would recognise. We found our movements becoming more physical and over the top so they knew what we were trying ot say.  

After we tried shouting by itself and then the physical movement by itself, we resulted to trying them both together, it helped a lot more because the two played off of eachother and highlighted one another.

Task 2 - The next task we done was to walk around the space in our own neutral state and then wait until our teacher called out a still image that we had to create with th eperson closest to us. We done things such as War and Peace, Romeo and Julliet and cat and mouse however the still image that seemed to have a unanimous decision was Rich and poor. Everyone portrayed the rich man as tall and strong with a broad chest whyereas the poor was on their knees and below the rich with their shoulders hunched. We wondered why this is and I came to the conclusion that societyforces us to think a certain way and we as people don't ever question what we are taught, we never ask about the stigmas that are attached to epople which was one of Brecht's aims. He wanted everyone to leave the theatre questioning what they had just seen and asking others about the way their mind works.

Task 3 - We then created an example of gestus is our next task, one person had to walk through the room as a soldier, we all noticed his physical characteristics, taught shoulders, broad chest firm walk, yet once others were moved into the scene the image of a soldier became different, the other people in the scene were dead corpses laying on the floor, the soldier walked through them seamlessly kicking their bodies without second thought. The meaning of the soldier becomes more powerful, we see him as relentless and as though he is immune to the world of death and horrors of war. 

Task 4 - Gestus is the work of physical gesture combined with attitude to create a brechtian style of theatre, our last task was to get into groups and create a still image that represents "War the maker of Heroes" and "War the taker of lives". Our physical actions portrayed a charicature of each of those things, when we were showing the heroes everyone was upright and rigid, there were no form of levels so everyone was of high status, when we were portraying the killers we had different evels and different physical gestures.