Using placards:

A placard is a sign or additional piece of written information presented onstage. Using placards might be as simple as holding up a card or banner. Multimedia or a PowerPoint slideshow can also be used for this effect. The musical, Miss Saigon, for example, used a slideshow to demonstrate the loss of lives in the Vietnam War which was highly effective. What’s important is that the information doesn’t just comment upon the action but deepens our understanding of it.

For example, a married couple are arguing and the wife is very upset. If the actress held up a placard saying ‘I’m miserable’ that wouldn’t tell us anything about the character that we didn’t already know. However, if her placard said ‘I’m having an affair’ or ‘I’ve never loved him’ the audience would be forced to consider other aspects of their relationship and to think about deeper reasons behind her tears.
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Placard examples:


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The Performance

As we had been learning about Brecht and his conventions, we decided to do our end of year performance using one of his plays. We used the play Mother courage which is about status and morality during wartime. Throughout the play it is possible to see that the only truly innocent and morally right character is Mother Courage's mute daughter Katterin, who in the end dies. Mother courage and most of the other characters feed off war and are quite happy to make sure that it continues to occur. We all decided to perform the first scene of the play.

Chloe was our director for this piece and she assigned roles to all of us. I was assigned the role of mother Courage, due to time restrictions (we only had four days to practice/less because of other lessons) I didn't get any other roles such as lighting or projections as I had quite a lot of lines to learn. Our main directorial concept for our piece was to show the innocence of Katterin compared to the other characters who were all money and power hungry. This was shown through lighting costume and just the general mise en scene.

Our general mise en scene was kept minimal as this was typical of a Brecht performance, keeping with Brechts conventions, we also used placards and projection to highlight key information and moments. Lighting was used in an interesting was, for example at the moment the recruiter strikes a deal with Mother Courages son, it was done using shadow and the shaking of hands behind a screen while something else was happening in front of the screen.

After performing this, I thought we all did well considering we had a very limited amount of time. However if we were to do this again, I would make sure that we had a longer time to learn out lines so it would have made it easier to focus on our acting. I also would have changed the performance space slightly as the audience all had to be cramped in one corner to see the play, this also prevented some people from seeing the shadows which was a main part in our performance.

Summer homework 

For out Summer homework we have to create an individual performance based off of one of Brechts conventions, which can be altered slightly. This is to prepare for our real solo piece which will be performed at the end of year 13. In the lesson we had some time to think about what we could use. I decided to use placards and some of my ideas included using them for:

• thoughts and feelings of different types of people 
• a starting point for a story 
• Used to show the emotions of a character and point out time of day/year 
• interlinking character situations through placard

For our last performance, we did scene 1 of Brecht's Mother Courage. Chloe was our director and we only had 4 lessons till we were to preform it.

My role was Recruiter and i also did costume, I was inspired by Brecht's minimal set to also have minimal costume. The girls were to wear long skirts to suit the time period and the men were to wear black tops and black shorts, Mother Courage wore a hat that was a bit over the top. Kattrin wore a white dress showing she was pure and innocent. The sergeant and recruiter wore suits to show professional and superior.

In the actual performance, there were somethings that went wrong like Kattrin forgot her lines but it was fine because we made it look like it was part of the performance. Also, when it was meant to end, people kept going. But, I think that it went really well considering we only had 4 lessons. Our moment of TEAM was in a freeze frame. Mother and the 2 boys were on the ground, The two army men stood above them showing power over them. Kattrin stood on the cart and her hands in the air showing warning. Being stood on the cart showed she was above everyone.

I think we all did very well and Ive really enjoyed year 12, see you next year!