Style- Brecht

His Style

Brecht's style of Epic theatre was very light hearted in the way he devised his performances and wanted to make the audience think. Brecht was very against theatre that made his audience attached as he believed when they became emotional they lose there ability to think so he made his audience to be distance but be engaged and excited this is the Verfremdungs effect or alienated effect. This involves breaking the third wall.

His life

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 and was a medic in world war 1 and was very appalled by the war so when it was over he moved to Berlin. However when the Nazi's came into power he fled to America to try and escape the war and as he fled they removed his citizenship. Then in 1941 he became a resident of the USA however he was called abone by the house of american activity committie as he didn't fit in with the usual american life so he returned to Europe in 1947. HE then formed the Berliner Ensemble and through his theatre he created a political and personal voice.

Techniques he used

• Narration
• coming out of role
• speaking stage directions
• directly addressing audience
• using pla-cards 
• multirolling
• minimal props 
• symbolic props 
• symbolic lighting 
• song and dance 
• montage  
• spass (fun) 
• gestus 
• narration that jumps in time
• tableau

Our use of Brecht

we have used our knowledge of Brecht to create a scene from the caucasion chalk circle. we started by trying to make it as fun as possible by firstly using voice we did this by each having different tones and having different slang for example tom playing and old women using a high pitched sophisticated tone. We then worked through all his techniques working out how we could add them. we started with narration and decided that the singer is setting the scene at the beginning so he is narrating the story through his expression of singing. We then decided we were going to link 2 techniques together by coming out of role and speaking stage directions this helped us to link with the audience and make then distant as they the know that the piece isn't real and feel emotional toward the characters. We then decided to use pla-card to help with who we were playing as lots of people have to multi role. Each different person who multi-roled did it in a different way. Carl decided he is going to swap his pla-cards around by each of them being attached to a piece of string and tom decided he was have each character on his piece of paper and circle each one he was playing. We then are using minimal props and anything we do use is made from paper for example we use paper made bottles and paper made cakes. We also included song and dance in our piece to make it more exciting to watch. At the beginning we also include a tableau to set the scene before the action begins. We didn't include in our piece montage, narrative that jumps in time or symbolic props and lighting.

My thoughts on Brecht

When working on Brecht I liked some of his style however some of it I didn't like so much. I like how Brecht make his work distant by using narration and coming our of character as it creates a different feel to the way a performance is done. However I did not like his use of minimal props as some things don't look right when only making them out of things they are not for example the child being a pillow. I love using symbolic lighting even though we didn't use it in the piece as it helps to set a mood for the audience and helps them to decide how they feel towards the performance. I also love the use of multi-rolling if it is used right as it shows the talent of the actor and helps to make a performance different as there is 1 person being 2 people.