Quotes about Brecht's practice 

"We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the actions take place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself."

Describes the fact that Brecht wanted his theatre to get a message across to his audience, he didn't want to use theatre as entertainment but as a way of educating his audience. He wanted his plays to provoke a response that would make a change in the given society.

"If we ensure that our characters on the stage are moved by social impulses and that these differ according to the period, and we make it harder for our spectator to identify himself with them."

Describes the idea that the audience should be distanced from the character on stage as much as possible. Brecht plans to do this by making the onstage action motivated by social impulses.

"Such images certainly demand a way of acting which will leave the spectators intellect free and highly mobile."

Describes the idea that normal Stanislavski style theatre leaves the audience without any real thought at all. This is not what Brecht wanted to do with his audience. Brecht made sure that his audience was alert and thinking at all times so that they would understand the message and want to do something about it after leaving the theatre.

"Producing such images, is based on the 'Alienation effect'. A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar"  

Describes the Alienation Effect -  It involves the use of techniques designed to distance the audience from emotional involvement in the play through jolting reminders of the artificiality of the theatrical performance.

"In order to produce A-effects the actor has to discard whatever means he has learnt of getting the audience to identify itself with the characters which he plays."

The idea that the actors are not meant to use traditional methods of acting. They must distance themselves from their character and make their character not believable, instead they must use gestus to suggest a character.

"Even if he plays a man possessed he must not seem to be possessed himself, for how is the spectator to discover what possessed him if he does?"

The idea that real-style acting clouds the message which Brecht seeks to enforce into the audience. The actor must continuously only suggest a character and not become involved in the character. The actor must not become obsessed with the character he is playing.

"This principle - that the actor appears on the stage in a double role..."

The idea that an actor can perform multiple roles in order to distance himself from his role. An actor can swap role onstage during a performance in front of the audience. This also distances the audience from the characters.

"Without opinions and objectives one can represent nothing at all. Without knowledge one can show nothing; how could one know what would be worth knowing."

Again talks about the idea of his theatre needing to have an objective. He wants to inform the audience of problems in society, problems which they will want to  change once leaving the theatre.

"For choreography too there are once again tasks of a realistic kind." 

Choreography are often used in Brecht's plays. This is again used as a distancing effect. Songs and choreography sequences were usually upbeat, however would actually be talking about hard dark subjects.

How we put Brechts theory into practice: 

We took a part of the script 'A Dolls house' and used Brechts techniques to stage it. This included elements of:

1. Vocals (singing)
2. Gestus 
3. Multiple roles 
4. Choreography 
5. Breaking the 4th wall 
6. Speaking in 3rd person 
7. Narration 
8. Projection 

So recently we have been working on Stanislavski during our practical sessions.

We started our Stanislavski work by discussing the differences between realism and naturalism, this is a major thing to be able to distinguish as the majority of Stanislavski's work is based around naturalistic theatre and his "slice of life" philosophy. We started to work our way through Stanislavski's system and how we expected his actors to work:

First exercise:

- We were each told to imagine ourselves in certain settings, such as the desert, in a field. We also had to imagine the time of day that we were in that place.

- Then we were told to imagine that we were doing something around the house, or we were getting up in the morning. We each had to act out our motions of doing this.

I found this task overall ok, although I found it more difficult to try and act out the things that I had to imagine that I had never done before (such as go to a desert). One thing that I noticed I seemed to do during this exercise was try to exaggerate the actions that I was doing, this is because our 'inner actor' thinks that because the actions we are doing are quite boring (being in the kitchen) we then have to make them much bigger in order to make it dramatic.

We continued to work on Stanislavski's relaxation techniques during our practical sessions also:

The main relaxation technique we worked on involved all of us sitting in a group, crossing our legs and holding ours palms upward toward the ceiling. Once we had all sat in this position, we had to all make a constant humming noise, and if we needed to take a breath the noise was not allowed to stop. So we had to time our breaths in turn with each other so that the noise never stopped.

I found this exercise quite difficult at first because I was really self conscious about making this quite strange noise. But once we all started to make the noise, the exercise became much much easier.

Stanislavski Steps & terminology: 

1. Units and super objective 
2. Invisible rays 
3. Relaxation exercises and focus 
4. Stripping off our socialized selves 
5. what, why, where questions 
6. The 'germ' (backbone) 
7. Psychophysical action 
8. Given circumstances 
9. Imagination

How we practised these: 
Relaxation - To practise relaxation we used a meditation technique, to do this we all had to sit in a circle facing away from each other cross legged with our hands on our knees and meditate. I found this very hard at the beginning as I felt very self conscious, mostly because we had to make an "um" sound and no one wanted to start it off. However after a while I found that this became easier as I started to become less aware of the people around me and more focused on just myself. This was much easier the second time we did this exercise. After doing this I did feel more relaxed and calm. This meditation exercise is supposed to:

• Make your mind & body feel at peace with the world 
• Get rid of your socialized self 
• Help you adopt the "free-body" mind state, this is when you have a free state of mind, you are both stress and physically free

Psychophysical action - Using emotion memory, this is when you use a memory that provokes an emotion which can be used for a piece of drama. To practice this we took an extract from "A dolls house" and used emotion memory to provoke the relevant memories. I found this quite hard at the beginning as I found myself trying to think about my memory while at the same time trying to play a completely different character and read the lines. I felt this became a lot easier when the script was taken away as I felt it helped me focus more on the emotions without worrying about speech. Emotion memory helps with psychophysical action as it helps the actor connect the characters mind and body together, resulting in more believable acting.

Given circumstances - To practice this we were given a list of given circumstances such as "I share," and "I attack," we all had to choose one and preform the relevant actions to go with it. The others in the group then had to say whether they felt that the action was believable or not. At first I found this hard as I was using actions that did not look like they could actually be realistic, I felt this could have been because I was feeling slightly self-conscious as it was the first time I was doing something with an audience. However as we continued I actually started to enjoy the task a lot more. This helped to think about given circumstances as we had to think about:

• What else is in the room/space?
• Who am I with? 
• Where have I just come from? 
• Why am I here?