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"