Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Theatre Workshop
Working on our play, "The Price"
In Theatre Workshop today, we mainly focused on getting our play blocked. We gave out the parts and set about either learning lines or our songs. As I am a checkout girl, I had to learn the "Money, Money, Money" song, where they have changed the lyrics to make them relevant to the play. Other groups worked on their songs whilst we choreographed what we would do during the song.
We discussed what made our piece Brechtian and came up with these reasons:
1. We are reading the stage directions out loud to the audience.
2. The name of the man and the woman in the play are quite abstract.
3. The fact that we are singing songs, is a version of the "v-effect" as it alienates the audience by speaking our exact emotions.
4. By giving receipts to the audience, every time they move or touch their hair, this breaks the fourth wall and reminds the audience that they are still watching a piece of theatre.
5. Using bright lights - by keeping the audience lit up, it wont allow them to relax, therefore involving them more in the piece of theatre.
6. Our Characters: the physicality and voice of our characters helps them to be portrayed in a very two-dimensional way, which portrays clearly who they are. We can do this by stereotyping our characters and making them really bold and over the top.
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
Initial Ideas for our Political Protest
My group immediately decided to focus on psychiatric prisons and how the conditions there can make prisoners come out of jail a lot worse than when they went in. On researching this topic further, we were able to find out some of the shocking conditions that prisoners are treated.
"Prisoners in isolation are confined for at least 22-and-a-half hours a day in cells measuring less than eight square metres. In one prison alone - Pelican Bay State Prison, a remote facility on the north Californian coast - more than 1,000 inmates are confined in single, windowless cells with poor access to natural light. Exercise is limited to an hour-and-a-half a day, alone, in a bare, concrete yard with 20-foot-high walls with only a patch of sky visible through a partially-meshed plastic roof.
Prisoners in isolation don’t have access to work, rehabilitation programmes or group activities on any kind. They are also prevented from any contact with the outside world, and even consultations with medical staff take place behind barriers and visits from family or lawyers take place behind a glass screen. Prisoners are not entitled to regular telephone contact with relatives." a selection of text from this website exposing the awful conditions people are forced to live in.
Some of our initial ideas were to do it by the basketball courts, so that we can stand behind the mesh and pretend that we are inside the prison. We also decided to wear t-shirts that are going to have giant words on them that spell out what medical condition we have and the crime we committed, we will stand in the audience with hoodies on and then step forward whilst taking off the hoodies to reveal the t-shirts.
My most recent idea has been to then introduce the prisoners as if at a circus, so someone starts shouting "Roll-up, roll-up, come and see the most shocking, horrendous creature on the planet! The human!" as the prisoners are behind the fence shaking it, staring out and screeching. As the audience look at us the ring-master can explain that this is how prisoners feel everyday. Isolated, pressurised and segregated from the civilised human world.
Initial Political Protest Research - Prison Conditions
1752. The Quakers in Philadelphia were the first in America to make an organised effort to care for the mentally ill. The newly-opened Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia provided rooms in the basement complete with shackles attached to the walls to house a small number of mentally ill patients. Within a year or two, the press for admissions required additional space, and a ward was opened beside the hospital. Eventually, a new
1773. To deal with mentally
disturbed people who were causing problems in the community, the Virginia
legislature provided funds to build a small hospital in Williamsburg. Over the
years, the hospital grew in size as needs arose but remained within the historic
area of the city until the mid-20th century, when a new hospital was built in a
suburb. Today it is the Eastern State Hospital.
1792. The New York Hospital opened a ward for "curable" insane patients. In 1808, a free-standing medical facility was built nearby for the humane treatment of the mentally ill, and in 1821 a larger facility called the Bloomingdale Asylum was built in what is now the Upper West Side. In 1894, it was moved further away, to the suburb of White Plains and is currently under operation as the Payne-Whitney Westchester Hospital, a Division of the New York Hospital-Cornell Weill Medical Centre.
1817. In Philadelphia, The Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of their Reason was opened under Quaker auspices as a private mental hospital. It continues to serve this function to this day as the Friends Hospital.
1824. The Eastern Lunatic
Asylum was opened in Lexington, Kentucky, as the first mental institution west
of the Appalachian Mountains. It still operates today under the name, Eastern
State Hospital.
By 1890,
every state had built one or more publicly supported mental hospitals, which
all expanded in size as the country’s population increased. By mid-20th century, the hospitals housed
over 500,000 patients but began to diminish in size as new methods of treatment
became available.
http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/prison-mental-health/forced-psychiatric-drugshttp://www.hrw.org/news/2010/03/22/solitary-confinement-and-mental-illness-us-prisons
Some links to websites that have some more information on the ethics of prisons and a true story of a prisoner forced into using psychiatric drugs.
Gestus
Gestus is a combination of gestures and attitude.
For example: Keon marched on stage, stood at the front of the stage, saluted and marched off again. The gesture of him saluting made it clear to the audience that he was a soldier.
Then, by putting more people on stage and pretending they are dead bodies and getting Keon to march on, kick the dead bodies and then salute to the audience, reveals his true attitude towards them. The gesture of him kicking the soldiers gave the audience and insight into his attitude.
Another example: Dainty Fidget - one of the stereotypical characters - We know she is a beautician already. But by handing a customer's coat over, holding it at arms length by her finger tips, her attitude comes across very clearly towards upper class people.
We developed our own actions, so for Lucy Luscious, I decided to be serving drinks happily, but then when I turn around to shake a martini, my face is bored, annoyed and how I feel will also be reflected in how I make the drink and my actions. This successfully allows my gestures to convey my attitude.
Characters Exercise
In this exercise we were all given stereotypical characters. I was Lucy Luscious the barmaid. We had to develop the characters to make them even more stereotypical. We had to think about our physicality and our voice and had to develop this further. We had to have a tag-line to emphasise our character, "Can I get you anything? Beer, Vodka, plate of peanuts?" we then had to really exaggerate our characters physicality and voice.
From this exercise I have learnt even more about Brecht stereotyping characters to create a sense to the audience that they are a certain class, which portrays to the audience why they are doing the actions on stage.
This allows the audience to question their presence on stage. It also made me realise that Brecht's characters are not three-dimensional, they are being stereotypically represented on stage to portray themselves to the audience.
It engages the audience because what they are doing on stage is interesting, yet it also manages to distance the audience because there aren't real people being portrayed onstage, they are stereotypes, so the audience are not trying to work out who they are and why they are there.
It doesn't engage the audience in the character's story either. So they focus on why they are there, not who or what the story is about. This is another clear example of Brecht's alienation technique. The tag-line we say alienates the audience from who the character is, so the audience don't have to work to follow the story.
Class Notes on "The Price"
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