Brecht

Name: Bertolt Brecht

Birth: 10^th February 1898, Germany

Job: Practioner, poet, playwright, and theatre director.

Description:

In World War 1 Brecht was a medic and became appalled with war as well as any forms of violence. He moved to Berlin to peruse his career in drama after war but had to flee Germany in 1933 due to the Nazi party and ran away to America. Brecht returned to Europe in 1947 and created the Berliner Ensemble. He changed theatre to a more unique and exciting performance by creating what soon was known as “Epic Theatre” because he wanted to make his audiences think. He said he wanted audiences to “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.

He wanted the audiences to be distant from emotional involvement with the characters he creates by using certain techniques to remind audiences that their watching a show. Verfremdungseffekt is often called the audience effect which the separation of the stage and audience but Brecht didn’t want this for his audience, to prevent this he broke the 4^th wall in most of his performances.

Traits:

·         Narration/Narrative which jumps around in time (non-linear)

·         Coming out of role

·         Speaking stage directions

·         Directly addressing the audiences

·         Using placards

·         Multi-roleing

·         Minimal props/set/costumes

·         Symbolic props

·         Symbolic lighting

·         Song and dance

·         Montages (a series of short scenes grouped together)

·         Spass (fun)

·         Gestus

·         Freeze frames or tableau

Our performance ideas:

Based around the performance traits of Brecht we have stylised our performances of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” to be like one of his performances.  We had an idea for the part of the singer to be changed in to a narrator who we thought could have read our stage directions of our characters out loud to the audiences. We positioned him near the front of stage so he could address the audience when speaking and we also thought he could watch the performance with the audience to help destroy the 4^th wall. We had an idea based around Brecht’s methods that for each of our character we have a piece of paper tapped to our chest with our character names on as well as the other characters we play because we have a lot of multi-roleing in our scene. We also had a similar idea that for some of our props we would use in the scene like a prop we use is a trumpet but we created it using a picture of one instead with musical notes on for the music instead of real music. We also had the idea of using our phone to play music for the trumpet in the scene but we decided we prefer the musical notes on the sheet as we feel it was funny and more true to Brecht’s drama methods. Other ideas we had involved the voices of some of our characters like the Monks voice isn’t well pronounced and speaks like “Chav” which helps to show that the Monk was inexperience in his work which we believed would add humour to the scene.