Physical Theatre

This is a form of theatre that is movement driven rather than dialogue driven. A piece of physical theatre is usually abstract and the movement is stylised and representational. Physical theatre is a combination of multiple things: devised, music, sound, dance, lighting, commedia, masks and a challenge of the fourth wall.

DV8

This group that consists of mostly men, is one of the main practitioners of physical theatre. They are an international company that don't produce meaningful dances they focus on the dramatic potential of movement by combining dance, sound and drama. They strictly don't use scripts and their performances are primarily about relationships and social/cultural issues.

Frantic Assembly 

This is another physical theatre group. This group differs from DV8 by combining dialogue and physical movement, they take scripts and add movement to enforce a feeling or theme in the performance (e.g. Curious Incident movement piece.)

Stylised Movement

This is movement used specifically to show something (e.g. A battle or control) Steven Berkoff used people to create every piece of set (beds, cars, ships etc) 

Techniques

Mime - realistic silent movement

Gesture - small motion of hands so signify something

Status - levels/distance between characters/strength of contact

Proximity - distance/lack of distance to audience 

Motif - something that keeps repeating 

Stance

Harshness/tenderness

Movement/lack of

Speed

Mask

Dance

Contact Improvitation

This is a technique of physical theatre that is usually done in duets. It consists of one person creating an impulse and the reciprocate then absorbs the impuls and responds to it.    I feel this is a greate way to show controls in a piece.

Our piece

The piece my group and I are doing is created from the stimulus of the news story "Je suis Charlie" we start with the group in a clump which is representational of the Muslim religion. We then all move to have four of us on the floor (desk chairs) and the other four of us sitting on them doing a motif of us drawing for a magazine and saying the name "Charlie" this builds in volume until someone yells Mohammad, then we go silent. We go back in the ball and two people peel off to reprosent that some people losing their faith. We then move to make a park and the two that peeled off become the terrorists. We go back to the clump and two more peel off. The four remaining then move out and we become six people standing around the room.The two terrorists then come back to kill the sixth of us using different techniques like contact improvisation and lift. Four people go back to the clump and two more peel away (we wanted to slowly leave one person isolated on stage to show loneliness) we then do a running thing where we try and hit the terrorists but they have a protective bubble around them (they aren't moving) so every time we hit them we bounce off and go in a different direction, we wanted to show that the terrorists had all the power in the current situation. But at the end we use movement to show a shift it power and we kill the two terrorists. Then back to the clump of two people one peels of and the seven of us crowd around the last guy and we say things like we blame you and your religion for it. We end with him yelling "je suis Charlie" showing that he didn't have anything to do with it but we still blame him.

Evaluation

I think that both the performances went well. The other groups performance was more abstract and dance orientated where I felt ours was movement, sound and story telling based. I could have improved by finding a way of being in time with everyone else when we are in the office cus it threw me off so I didn't starts the Charlie thing. As for physical theatre as a whole I can appreciate the style of DV8 and their abstract telling of messages and meanings but I wouldn't pay top price to see one of their performances, but the style of Frantic Assembly the use of physical theatre to heighlight a meaning/message/feeling/idea is what I prefer.

Brecht

Life
Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 Germany, in university he studied drama and took a medical course. When he was drafted into the army for the first world war he was transferred to be a medical orderly in a military VD clinic. He was only part of the army for the last few months of the war and that was enough to make him a pacifist. During the Wiemar period of Germany Brecht created his first full length play which started his career and began his trend of creating plays to question others work. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis, who were very pro-war, caused Brecht to flee to the USA he stayed there for the duration of the second world war but after the war ended America became very anti-Communist during the cold war. Brecht had Communistic views so he went back to Germany where he died in 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58.

Epic Theater
Brecht didn't like that when people went to the theater, there brains switched off as the story and characters were given to them on a plate. So he created a theater where the audience has to think about what they are watching. He never wanted to replicate life and put it on stage he wanted to present world problems on stage to make the audience think about it. He also didn't want his audience having an emotional attachment to his characters so he used Verfremdungseffekt in his plays. Verfremdungseffekt is a theater technique designed to distance the audience from the characters, not so much that they don't care what happens to the characters but just enough so they won't cry over a character death. An easy way to accomplish this is by breaking the fourth wall. 

Other ways to create Brecht's Epic Theater:
Narration,
Coming out of character,
Speaking stage directions,
Directly addressing the audience,
Using placards,
multi-rolling,
Minimal props/costumes/set,
symbolic props,
symbolic lighting,
song + dance,
montage,
Gestus (gestures to show a character e.g. superhero hands on hips)
Narrative which jumps around time,
Freeze frames/tableau,
Spass (slapstick commedy, make the audience think "I'm not supposed to laugh at that")

Our performance
For our performance of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, we have decided to open it with a small dance while the singer performs his line as this will be a fun way to open the scene. We are also going to multi-role most of the characters, except the mother-in-law and Grusha, and we are going to step out of character and say the stage directions. In regards to costume we are going to where our regular cloths but we have each decided on a way to present our current character, Tom is planning on wearing name tags on his shirt which have all his characters on and he will have a pen and circle the character he is being, Harry has his name on the end of his bed, which is really two chairs and a duvet. I am planning on having placards with my Characters name on it and just switch names as I change role. As I play Lavrenti i plan on having a gesture of smoking a cigarette the whole time, when I am a musician I will play the ukulele as I say my lines, the ukulele will just be a picture on paper of a ukulele. During the scene we have a baby Michael (a pillow with the name baby/Michael on it) we are also given cakes so we have scrunched up paper balls for cake.

Evaluation

I feel that both performances went well, both groups shoved as many Brechterian techniques as possible into their performance but I liked how they pulled the performances off. As for the style of Brecht himself, I like to watch it, I like how it makes me think a little bit while watching the performance but I don't like performing in a Brechterian way. I prefer performing in a more naturalistic way than in epic theatre.