End of Year Performance & Summer homework
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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:
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
These are all starting points and can be developed if one of them is chosen.
