Lesson 4 (Political Protest Evaluation) - 22.11.16

Today we had our Political Protest performances. My group created our piece on the mistreatment of mentally ill prisoners/patients. Our piece consisted of me playing a guard, and 5 others as patients, each with a different mental illness showing how they would be affected by mistreatment. On our costumes we had statistics written to really engrain the horrific unjust. We also used some brechtian techniques such as breaking the fourth wall. Some of our statistics were:

• 49% of Women and 23% of Men have anxiety and depression in prisons
• 40% of facilities regarding mental health are understaffed.
• 40% of women experience an eating disorder during their stay in British prisons

I feel like this research really helped affect the piece as it was very relevant. It helped engage the audience and I think it was very engraining. Here is some research about the different kinds of protests there are:

SIT IN - Remaining in one place, refusing to move. People do this sometimes to protest against the removing of nature reserves or people against the war in Iraq.

MARCHING - Walking in groups from one place to another, usually with signs. This has been done by students who protest about the raising of University fees.

BOYCOTTING - Refusing to do business/deal with a certain company. Some activists boycott certain shops in protest against sweatshops or child labour. Some in protest against the mistreatment of animals.

STRIKING - Workers refusing to go to work. Southern trains employees strike all the time. 

Our performance went very well and I feel that we definitely had an engaging performance both informatively and entertainment wise. It is quite difficult when approaching a sensitive subject to not take the real message out of it when putting it into a performance, and I think that amongst the carnage and entertaining violence, there was a really important message about how mentally ill prisoners and patients aren't given the treatment needed to function or progress with recovering to be a fully functioning member of society. 

There was one moment where I heard one of the audience members ask "What do you want me to do about it?" which made me think as I didn't really have an answer for that question,  however, I feel like that's the question we were trying to provoke, as at this moment in time it doesn't have an answer.
To make our piece better we could have maybe made our loop longer, as we managed to get a larger audience stay for longer, which was not what we expected. We also could have maybe had more statistics and facts scattered around as our piece have been unclear to some people, or may not have provided the relevant information just in the physical performance.
For me, artistically I achieved some important things. This was my first ever piece of political theatre I have created and performed. You learn a lot from yourself about how to be sensitive towards the subject. As a an actual theatre product, I don't think that this could be something easily put on a stage as the storyline is very simple and I don't think you would be able to stretch out what we have to fit a full on production.

We also did some rehearsing for our debating chamber performance. My group are using the playscript from "A Day at the Racists" by Anders Lustgarten. We looked at incorporating live music into it and will be using the song "A Whole Lot of Loving" by Beans On Toast, in a pub scene. We are also deciding to use a stand up comedy routine using racist jokes. We will develop this piece further next week. We also discussed the placement of the song and we are unsure of where to put the song as the lyrics are very relevant:

"A WHOLE LOT OF LOVING" - BEANS ON TOAST

Don't blame the immigrants,

The poor, or the unemployed,

These are not the ones who are to blame.

The country's fucked that's obvious,

by the swan song of the NHS,

but the flood warnings came long before the rain.

And it's in these times of trouble,

that fascism rears it's head,

and the UK Independence Party are just the BNP in a different dress

They're still the same old homophobic racists as before,

They're probably sending junk mail full of hate to your front door,

and they've got,

billboards on the high street, telling you you should be scared,

'cause these evil motherfuckers, they capitalise on your fear.

But I'm not worried about the worries of the world anymore,

I'm gonna get in the jacuzzi,

I wish that everybody would just chill the fuck out,

And get busy, being happy

We need a spiritual revolution, I believe you Russell Brand,

We need food and we need shelter, friends and family at hand,

And apart from that we don't need nothing,

except a whole lot of loving

Well the NASA think tanks think,

that we will fall just like the romans did,

and other civilisations before them that are now extinct.

The well runs out, the fuel runs dry,

there's not enough food to feed us all

our leaders blindly lead us,

claiming it's business as usual

while saving up the scraps for themselves,

until the shit falls off the shelves

Well I'm not worried about the worries of the world anymore,

I'm gonna chill in the jacuzzi,

I wish everybody would just chill the fuck out,

and get busy, being happy

We need a spiritual revolution, I believe you Russell Brand,

We need food and we need shelter,

friends and family at hand

And apart from that we don't need nothing,

except a whole lot of loving

And apart from that, we don't need nothing,

except a whole lot of loving.

I did a little bit of character research before we started devising. Here is what I found out.

PETE: White, 50s, Supports labour party, used to work in a factory, now works as a painter/decorator.

MARK: Pete's son, 20s, likes football, vain, also a painter/decorator

GINA: Young, asian, involved in politics.

We are not 100% sure on whether we will use this research to influence our performance at all but it was a good starting point while researching the play. 

Lesson 3 - 16.11.16

Lesson 3 - 16.11.16

SPASS

In today's session we looked at some more Brechtian techniques. We started by looking at something called 'Spass'. The literal translation of 'Spass' is 'fun'. Brech believed that the actors on stage should have as much fun as the audience, because if the actors were having fun, then that meant the audience would have fun too. Brecht didn't want his work to be taken too seriously and thought that comedy was a good way to get the audience engaged and think about certain issues. He also used Spass to break tension. He would frequently use slapstick comedy, a song or physical comedy to really break this tension. It also frequently used a prolific social comment.

The exercise we did was called Servants and Snobs. Brecht often used this exercise with company's he worked with to really break down tension. The premise of the game is simple. It starts with everyone except one person as a servant. The odd person out is the snob. The servants must be cleaning and be serving the snob's every need for example being a human chair. As the game goes on, more and more servants are made into snobs to the point where there are more snobs than servants. If it so happens that a snob goes to sit down, but falls as there is no one there to act as a human chair. They must fall on the floor and everyone has to point at them and laugh.

GESTUS

We also looked at another Brechtian technique called Getus. Gestus is a particular character gesture made to capture a moment or an attitude, instead of diving deep into the emotion of the character. Brecht didn't technically want the actors to be the characters on stage, only to show them as a type of person. He wanted the type of person that the actors were playing, to be a representative of every type of that person. He wanted us to judge the character and the situation.

ARCHETYPES
We then looked at Brechtian archetypes. An archetype is "a very typical example of a certain person or thing."  Brecht wanted to show characters as a type of person on stage, so to do this, typical archetypes are built on the character's social role and why they need to behave as they do. We looked at archetypes such as: The "mother"(typically carrying a baby), the "killer" (typically in a stance ready for violence) and the "mad person". There are also other archetypes such as the joker and the femme fatale (fatal woman). We looked at how putting 3 different types of archetypes into different orders can change the way a story could go. We started with The killer in the beginning spot, the mad person in the middle spot, and the mother at the end spot. People would give their differnt interpretations and then we switched them around. The mother was in the beginning spot, the killer in the middle and the mad person in the last spot. We then had to make a story out of that, for example: A woman has a child, however, the child dies and she starts to kill people and goes insane. 


NOT/BUT
We explored Brecht's 'not but' technique. Essentially, this means: "I have been told not to do this, but I will do this", or "I have not been allowed in but I will keep moving." The not/but element involves the actor preceding each thought that is expressed by their character in the dialogue or each action performed by their character in the scene with its dialectical opposite. It's main function is to inscribe alternatives for a character.
To bring this to life, we then set up a scene that is inspired by a scene from Brecht's play "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", where the Governor's Wife has to flee the palace as it has been attacked. It mostly revovled around the relationship between the governor's wife and the other people in the scene. The characters in the scene had to use archetypes, gestus and not/but in their characterisation. We looked at how she used the not/but element when making a decision on whether she wants to focus on her son's safety before her own. Often this is done by making a double take, sometimes sharing that with the audience and opening up to them to show them how you really feel.
As an actor this is a useful exercise as it opens up your mind to different opportunities a character could take, therefore understanding your character even more.

V EFFEKT
The V Effekt (verfremdungseffekt)  was a concept created by Brecht to give an effect of alienation and distancing to the audience. He aimed to avoid emotional involvement with the characters to keep audiences interested and engaged. An essential part to verfremdungseffekt is that the fourth wall does not exist between actors and audience. The use of direct audience address takes away the illusion of the stage. The viewer is forced into a critical analytical frame of mind.

In this lesson, we then had to use all of these techniques that we had learned about and apply them to a piece of text. We used an extract from the play "Mother Courage and Her Children"

Lesson 2 - 8.11.16

Lesson 2 - 8.11.16

In today's lesson we started by working on our political protest pieces. My group did some devising so we had a bit to show to other groups, we also did some research about our individual characters as one part of our performance is that we will have facts and stats written on our costumes. As my character as a guard, I looked at understaffing and how patients are treated in mental facilities and prisons. The rest of the people in my group are playing the parts of mentally ill patients. We also made a decision that the mentally ill will wear white jumpsuits with statistics written on them. We received feedback from people who watched a bit of our piece and were told that it was very engraining. We still feel we need to work more on doing more rehearsed parts instead of improvising so much of it.

SOURCE: http://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/mental-health-crisis-care-services-under-resourced-understaffed-and-overstretched/#.WCIqjOGLT9A

Services are understaffed: Four in ten mental health trusts (41 per cent) have staffing levels well below established benchmarks.

Services are not available all the time: One in ten (10 per cent) crisis teams still fails to operate 24-hour, seven-day-a-week services

There is a lack of respect and dignity: Less than a third (29 per cent) said they felt all staff treated them with respect and dignity.

We also did a lot of work in the afternoon in the style of Brecht. We looked at characterisation in the style of Brecht and did an exercise where we had to create inanimate objects in groups and then we were told to give them a mood/feeling. For example - angry motorbike, depressed chair, sexy esccalator etc...
This is a method used by Brecht to help give character to objects, which in turn links them to certain characters. For example, if the depressed chair looks old and decrepit, then an audience can infer that it belongs to someone of that similar description. This is useful as an actor to help you with working as a group and understanding characterisation.
We also did an exercise on characterisation where we were told to lead with a certain part of our body, and from there, instinctively create a character. A few people had to keep in these character's while the rest of the class had to infer what kind of person they were portraying, and their social class. Brecht used this method to make it clear to audiences about what social class someone may be. One that stood out to me was Jacob when we were told to lead from our knees, he seemed to have made the character of a drunk person. It was difficult to infer what kind of class he came from as alcohol is not necessarily associated with any social class. However, as soon as he was instructed to pretend to have a cigar in his mouth, it immediately infers he is from a higher social class as cigars are expensive and usually scene as a sign of wealth. This is interesting to take part in as an actor as it really shows how little you need to do for an audience to before they start making assumptions.

Lesson 1 - 1.11.16

Lesson 1 - 1.11.16

We started off by exploring the question "What is the function of Theatre?". 

Answers such as: To educate, to entertain, to provoke conversation, to brainwash and to inform were all prevalent answers however we decided to talk about "to educate" and "to entertain" as they seemed to be the most frequent. 

We talked about whether a piece of theatre can be both educational and entertaining. In my opinion, it is possible, but it's totally subjective of someone's personal definition of educate and entertain. For me, to be entertained is to be totally engaged with a piece, it doesn't have to necessarily be funny or make me laugh as I've seen plays that make me feel scared or uncomfortable which I still feel like I was entertained by. Personally, I've seen The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Nighttime and I definitely learned a few things from it about autism, and learning disabilities and how certain people deal with them and how certain people are affected by them. It was also a very entertaining play, it included comic elements and was overall an enjoyable experience. Some people said that they believed that most of the time if something is educational, it isn't entertaining, as entertainment tends to come from comedy and al lot of educational/serious pieces of theatre don't obtain both of those traits. 

Next we did an exercise where we took a headline from a newspaper article, and we had to create a small piece of naturalistic theatre, playing out that story. Our headline was: "Halloween warning of creepy clown pranksters". We decided to do a small news television show that linked to an interview with a councillor and then some "live footage". Afterwards, we were given this sheet: 

It outlines the differences between dramatic theatre and epic theatre (used by Brecht). 

It shows how usual theatre works and it was interesting how a lot of the parameters on that left side of the sheet were used in our piece. On the right side there are equivalents that you could use to make your piece in to Epic Theatre. For example, instead of having a linear story line develop, you could have curves to make it more unpredictable. 

If I could change the naturalist piece we did to an epic theatre piece I would change the order of the scenes and the put the live footage scene at the beginning to give it a montage feel. 

We will also be preparing a short political protest theatre piece based on an issue we feel must be protested. My group have decided to use the subject of mistreatment of mentally ill patients in asylums and prisons, and patients not able to get the treatment needed. 

A couple of websites I will be using for research: https://www.cchrint.org/2014/11/13/top-10-forms-of-psychiatric-institution-abuse/

http://jpma.org.pk/full_article_text.php?article_id=1505