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.