Communication of the humanist message

In the end of our performance we all stood up and scattered around the space delivering a eulogy/obituary or summary of our life as if we'd just died. This along with the depressing melody and the effect of all of as reciting our eulogies at once created a pathos for the audience.

I decided to write a poem as if I'd just committed suicide and was reading one at my own funeral.

She was a girl with no roots to the ground,

In a gawky bubble she drifted around,

She was a dreamer, an occasional screamer,

Though she screamed in a way that no one could hear her.

She saw no purpose in this world of mundanity,

Living faintly in her misshapen reality.

She breathed through adventure,

and thrills of high moments,

But her empty lungs conjured up torments.

She knew exactly where she should've been born,

The bright orange jacket she should've worn,

The warrior pact by which she should've sworn,

The villain flesh she should've torn.

But all she could be was a roeless thorn.

Which is why today it is her that we mourn.

This was followed by the ending where we brought flowers and items with sentimental value to the table and named their prices to end on  "love costs nothing"

I think that we were successful in some ways in delivering a humanist message from our use of Brechtian exaggeration and satirical skits of heavy topics. Our goal was to communicate this message to the audience which I think we did as our play enforced an marketed socialism in the slaps of our Dragon's Den and Britain's got Talent remakes because of the victims we strongly identified. Our use of the chorus of capitalist snobs turning into filthy public school kids or groups of women throwing money around was really effective. Adding these touches of a musical  reminded the audience they were watching a play like spontaneous singing in mundane situations does and drew more attention to the message rather than the naturalism of the scenes. Although these chorus parts could have been made more efficient and slick if they were rehearsed the same way at least in the end of the rehearsal process because some of it got lost. The game show was supposed to be a direct and simple dig at the audience to get the message by placing them as plebs and  bosses which was a very clear and challenging idea in theory. But as we didn't have extensive seating it might have not been as effective. 

Austerity the game show

Our theme and centre of our show is going to be Austerity in the UK. Government cuts or tax increase as part of policies made to reduce budget deficits. These policies come with a price: The increase in un-employment, creating more debts in the country, reducing spending because of the money in household pockets starts to reduce etc… 

Due to this there have been many Protest marches and demands against Austerity in the UK. But our protest against it will be a Brechtian style performance to challenge the audience into facing the existing and potential problems in our society. With a comedic approach of a monopoly-like game show we are going to tickle our audience and then hit them with the disturbing reality. 
As the audience came in we rolled a dice symbolic of luck in the capitalist world and gave them seats based on their titles as Plebs or Bosses. This was a dark but comedic angle to start off with and made it a perfect tickle for us to then reveal darker and darker realities in the different episodes. Then as the game show came back on the Pleb life got increasingly harsh with the dismal fortune cards and tragic jail sentences. I think we were quite successful in slowly bringing across the idea of exploitation and letting the audience realize for themselves when to stop laughing.
The game show in my opinion brought the episodes together quite well. The transitions between scenes could've been improved but the constant themes of consumption, exploitation and need for socialism were very prominent throughout. Not just with the ongoing game show but with the very similar chorus we had in a lot of scenes which reinforced the V-effect and kept the messages strong. The luxury items being held out by slave shelf humans in the price, the ridiculous parade of walking advertisements that came through our focus group and the indulge market research discussion, the mass of demonized public school kids contrasted with the rich white men peering and laughing scathingly at socialism...

Focus group

A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging.
Focus groups are a company's ways of researching their market by setting up a meeting with their target audience. In most cases it's just a few people of their target audience with what we think are biased views of the product. This is part of their advertising much more than it is research because they can then legally come out with percentages and fractions of  "researched" data. For example there can be six women in a focus group and literally five out of the six can give positive feedback which would enable the company to say that 84% of women say the product has done wonders for them.

Would you rather

We came up with a way to show how biased focus groups are by creating a  commercial "would you rather" scam. Our handpicked characters would agree with the products and show immense enthusiasm and overestimation. We were also thinking about using placards for the "consumers" to humanize them and highlight their purposes on being in the focus group.

First of all we established some stereotypes that would be reacting to the comparisons different ways.
We have One overly sexual and thick female character who passes up no opportunity to jump up and down in excitement and let out unnecessary noises or touch everything like it's a naked baby.
On the front we'd state the obvious about her nature and on the                                                              back placard it would say                                                                                                                            
The second woman would a "female Joey Essex" and would ask questions like "OMG you actually got a caveman?!" and "what do you mean animal testing? cats don't need samples of anti-wrinkle cream..." On her front it wold say "Joey Essex dumb" and on the back placard "Lonely" This girl is the salesman's tool; she'll believe anything. The oh so sexy one however will be walk out of the group a walking ad creating a consumer ripple effect.

We were also debating weather to have a "Eco-warrior" or a "fame-whore". Possibly a nerdy girl; a sci-fi freak, part of a big green hippie club.giving but so, so annoying with a dorky habit of correcting everyone. She'll also have a sadder reality on her back, maybe "never want to be seen as a failure". By developing these characters more we could establish the V effect in our performance. The placards would explain the character's inner and outer self and would create more of a fascination with our message. Along with the three stereotypes and the "cocky salesman" we'd have someone a little or a lot smarter; "a snob".
The one out of the hypothetical six consumers that had a negative feedback to a product. On her inner/back placard it would say "insecure".

She would have a lot to say but would be stopped by the smug salesman and humiliated. The slap in this case being  the consumer manipulation present in out society and how businesses view the actual people in their precious target audiences.
We started by coming up with our offensive and comedic would you rather.
Our products could be generic like miraculous boob jobs, Botox heaven in a bottle, Brazilian goddess wax etc... Mark the sales guy would advertise them by contrasting Katie Price boobs with anorexic chests, Brilliant Brazilian with caveman wax, Joan river's face (that probably still feels like a baby's bottom six feet under) with a 90 year old prune failing to be a cougar. My favorite one was for the fake tan that Daisy came up with;
would you rather look like an Irish albino or have Umpa-Lumpa-luscious complexion? 
The clever snob would try to contradict these questions saying she doesn't want to feel like a nine year old down there or that the cream has ghastly ingredients that are written so small people overlook them. She will of-course be hushed by Mark breaking the fourth wall. We thought that every time that someone says anything negative about the product, Vlad pauses the scene and changes their words around to make them like the project and if they still refuse to like it he then twists their words even more so and poses them to be negative people.

the caveman wax and old phone

For fulfilling the V-effect in our Brechtian focus group we also used props. The two "bimbos" would be wearing uncomfortably high stilettos and the "snobby bitch" would have on glasses as character definitions. We sourced Mark the jackass a symbolic gold phone. The key to the would you rather idea was having epic live representations. So we got Michael with balloons under his shirt and Becky with a wig under her bikini to bring to life the boob-job do and and wax-job don't. I found some blue face-paint from my corpse bride costume and we decided to use that as a capitalist anti-wrinkle cream that would then start to itch and burn. We would then wipe our humiliation away with money tissues Mark threw at us as yet another exaggerated semiotic.
We began improvising with a rough script of our ideas which we added on to in the rehearsal process.

Political Protest

   

In this day and age we have many social and political issues and just as many different ways of enforcing and challenging them. What is a protest if not a necessity to have your voice heard created by the severity of a social or political situation. Protest is marches, boycotts, illegal action, strikes riots and speeches but it can also be art. It can be a straight forward argument presented in theatrical way. The effect of that is the ability to bring an audience on something that seems to be an escape but is really Encapsulating the chaos and damage of political actions into art. It can be even more effective than a "real" protest. Something that has a completely different and appealing platform of provoking change. Takckling social issues and raising awareness over them in a narrative art form. I belive that every piece of good art is if not central to, influenced by a political angle or social issue. Perhaps because the best art comes out of pain and oppression. We, as a group and as individuals thought about the issues in the world that we feel strongly about. There were hot topics like the flaws of capitalism, the refugee crisis, discrimination, human trafficking, unequal healthcare and education etc...

As children of free speech and a powerful tool like Brechtian Theatre we are presented with countless possibilities to protest. The list of facts to challenge are also endless. Political theatre is a reflection of society and can be made into a very clear challenge towards a certain aspect of it. A Brechtian style is what would take a reflective piece of theatre and make it not only hold up a mirror to society but a hammer with which to shape it. Political theatre is Political Theatre, is Theatre that moves away from your normal story telling. I believe that Political Theatre is there to spark others, and their ideas. It should leave the audience leaving motivated, but they should be questioning themselves and the society they live in.

It addresses several issues, not just politics and the Government. We live in a society where Homophobia, Discrimination and Prejudice are common occurrences. Through Theatre, we can confront those issues and make the audience think about it. We can also confront the Government, and the current affairs we see on the news everyday.

 It gives us a chance as Actors, Directors and even Writers to talk about the issues we face everyday, and not be stopped for it. 

our PROTEST

Our protest was based on human value and idealism in the materialistic world of possibly privatised healthcare and money orientated adoption agencies. We tried to commit to being salespeople of a nicely packaged brand at a sample baby stall to question just how real the caricature we painted had the potential to become. We had our own brand catalogue and were pricing babies based on their ethnicity and gender.We put the most price on a male Aryan baby to challenge idealism and presented our capitalist company with variations of an ironic motto and logo, deciding on Stork and Co. "child trafficking the right way". We wanted to give the logo a warm family feel to make our point about the "human" yet inhumane companies who brainwash us daily. 

I initially pictured bugs bunny's hand grabbing a bitten carrot. The masked hand would suggest a dark manipulated side to the multi-millionaire kid's cartoon character's arm enjoying a healthy snack. And the bitten vegetable gave us the idea to write "get the app" below our logo. Finally we decided to go with a simple blue stork as a fantastical romanticized version of the truth behind these tedious adoptions.

Our roles in the protest were to be the over-friendly robotic people the Stall itself and take orders, answer questions, explain the company and ADVERTISE!  We were smiling up to our ears with banners posters and conversational proposals, really calm and friendly to contradict the callous reality of what we were actually doing. 

Before the protest we researched this topic finding out how much adoption really costs and we were shocked to find prices of $36000, most of it going for profit and advertising. We were looking at a reality in which adoption agencies become as commercialized as the food industry. We’d all walked past a “Hello fresh” type food delivery company stall and tried to incorporate some of their selling techniques to make our point on media manipulation. Our other political motive was to challenge the price of humans with disabilities or poor backgrounds. In our Baby Spring Catalog We had offers like free delivery coupons and three to five working days per child, as well as a romanticized version of the truth in our logo.

As a criticism of the success level of our protest I’d say there were a few things I’d do differently. First of all there were two other groups in a space near us and it seemed like our protest clashed a bit but we were still successful in bringing people over and getting desired reactions out of them. Lots of them questioned our pricing of the babies which was what we wanted but not as many noticed the point we were trying to make with the commercialization of our company. I feel like we could have gone even further with Stork and Co. and made an even bigger Brechtian style commercial of a protest. It was more like a naturalistic improvisation and was a bit far-fetched for all the people to fully understand. We all agreed on the potential for protest to be a theatrical product because all good theatre is political and a way to make a change in society is not only to threaten and demand for it.  

Brecht

Epic Theatre techniques in political theatre:

Brecht was a German playwright, practitioner/director and poet who made great advancements in the world of theatrical production and dramaturgy in the early 20th century.
Epic theatre is a theatrical movement, popularized in the early 20^th century. It came about as a reaction to realism, which was the accepted style of most artists at the time. Brecht and a few of his contemporaries found realism to be overplayed and did not promote individual criticism. Brecht founded a style that would counteract this in the form of epic theatre.
We are going to use Brechian techniques in creating political theatre. In this day and age most theatre is political and all good theatre has an uncensored political message. Brecht wanted not only to challenge his audience but create this political message in a very clear cut way. He looked at what theatre should be.


He saw it as weapon and a strong platform for both social and political change.
His epic theatre has a didactic style for the audience to think about and be challenged by. The Marxist notions are constant in his plays and anti-capitalist/bourgeois messages flow from is ideology. His technique is to brake the fourth wall in order to make clear political statements. He often disregarded naturalism in his epic theatre because he was constantly reminding the audience that they are watching a play rather than being immersed in the story. He wanted his audience to be thinking about the message after the performance is over. For this he decided to produce expressionist works of art that had power and meaning and move on from the naturalist style of theatre.

The V-effect 

Verfremdungseffekt, or the V-effect is used to describe the technique actors employ for creating a character in Brecht's Epic theatre. The gist of it is that theatrical illusion must be partial so that theatre is used used not as a mirror to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it. The technique lies in alienating the audience to make them look at theatre in a critical perspective rather than an emotional one which may arise from being drawn into a naturalistic performance. This is a way of distancing the audience from the emotional and letting them question and judge the message. He uses tools such a braking the fourth wall and placards to constantly remind the audience they're watching a play with a political message. This lets an audience experience an alien sense that distances them from the story and just lets them get the effect of the message. It's a similar sense to that of a child seeing their teacher being prosecuted and seeing them for the first time in a context being affiliated with crime or realising their mother is also a married woman seeing her as a wife for the first time. 

Brecht’s notion with epic theatre was that the spectators should see a particular scene or circumstances from more than one viewpoint and form their own judgements about what was going on. The audience will not get so drawn in that they forget they are watching a dramatic production once they experience the V-effect with all it's techniques. Another technique to make political messages clear is Brecht's Slap and Tickle. The use of dark humour goes a step further with teasing the audience and making them laugh at something serious and then "slapping them in the face" with the hard hitting reality of the message making them realise just what it was they were laughing at. 

Other techniques involve song, gestus, nonatualistic voice and movement, breaking the fourth wall, playing multiple roles, using placards etc.. 

“Epic Theatre turns the spectator into an observer, but arouses his capacity for action, forces him to take decisions...the spectator stands outside, studies.”

DRAMATIC THEATRE                                            EPIC THEATRE 

Plot	Narrative
Implicates the spectator in a stage situation	Turns the spectator into an observer but
Wears down	Arouses his capacity for action
Provides him with sensations	Forces him to take decisions
Experience	Picture of the world
The spectator is involved in something	He is made to face something
Suggestion	Argument
Instinctive feelings are preserved	Brought to the point of recognition
The spectator is in the thick of it, shares the experience	The spectator stands outside, studies
The human being is taken for granted	The human being is the object of inquiry
He is unalterable	He is alterable and able to alter
Eyes on the finish	Eyes on the course
One scene makes another	Each scene for itself
Linear development	In curves
Evolutionary determinism	Jumps
Man as a fixed point	Man as a process
Thought determines being	Social being determines thought
Feeling	Reason

Developing Brecht’s techniques

One of the key tools is communication, especially in political theatre. 

This is why we overdramatize to make a point and communicating clearly to the audience can be hard sometimes in naturalism. Naturally people are one animal but pretend to be another. 

You can only truly play a character if you know exactly what they are inside and out. But in epic theatre all of the cards are on the table; more specifically all of the placards. 

Brecht focuses much more on the political motive than on mystifying the characters for interesting naturalistic stories. 

The exercises we did to develop our ability to create political theatre helped me get my head around all this. The first exercise we did was with playing cards. We were given two sets of info; our status level in terms of cards (if you’re a King of hearts you’re much higher than someone who’s 2 of spades etc…) and a placard. 

We had to first walk around then socialize with the playing card in mind and then greet another citizen we didn’t know the identity of whist holding placards to the audience. This created irony and revealed much more than a simple gest of interaction. 

It gave the audience an opinion. We had placards like “Foolish heroic fireman” and “poor orphan” meant to challenge and reveal to the audience.

We did an exercise with nursery rhymes, using them as an example of a story used in political theatre to get across the message. The mission was to communicate it to our partners whilst they tried to do the same along with everyone else in the room which made the initial task quite difficult at first. Then we realized that rather than vague natural movements we needed to OVERdramatise and use gestus in our telling of the nursery rhyme

. As our actions grew bigger it made the communication much clearer. The use of gestus is very important in epic theatre because it means increasing the actions and adding an emotional intention to them. Like a group of soldiers marching would be a gesture but if you add a bunch of dead ones on the stage for them to march over then we have a clear message and context of the gest that for example the soldiers are being controlled by politicians as robots and the insensitivity for human life combined with brainwashing is what caused this war.

Overall we established that epic theatre is of reason and non-engagement of emotion and is quite different to dramatic theatre which is designed to entertain. Epic theatre doesn’t want you to just be entertained and escape but to go away thinking about the message and the reason. Brecht believed that true change would come about if the audience had their brain stimulated from theatre and could leave inspired by argument and by reason to cause a change in society. Dramatic theatre relies on your soul being affected when you connect to characters not just engage your thinking process for you to change the world.