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