Today we were looking at gestus
Brecht's gift to modern theatre is social usefulness, He liberated theatre from imitations of life and allows different styles of acting to co exist.
Naturalism gives way to bold outlines comic exaggeration and a collage approach to production to put over a particular message.
Brecht says the most important thing is the story and you should take whatever means possible to get that across.
Stage life is artificial and can never be completely true to real life.
Brecht believes social situations change the way people behave unlike Stanislavsky he didn't believe there was an essential truth to a character, someone weak and humble could be changed into a hero if they had to.
Brecht believed people are formed by their society and culture and the time in which they live this can create a collective madness.
All theatre should be appropriate to the modern age and reflect life now as a social call to challenge society.
We did an exercise where we would pair up and create different images that we were told to make such as cat and mouse, rich and poor, winter and summer. We noticed that when rich and poor was mentioned everyone created a similar image of a poor person begging on the ground and a rich person towering above them showing dominance and the stereo type of the rich and poor divide. This was interesting as not only did it show how visual images represent situations and the power an image has as the image of a poor person being stood on is a powerful and impacting image but it also showed how we have certain stereo types for things and have been taught that certain things look a certain way when portrayed visually.
Gestus is the combination of gesture, facial expression, body language and vocal tone deliberately used to create and communicate a meaning to the audience. It shows the stage picture but also it sums up societies opinion on the situation shown through the lens of what its like to be rich or poor. It is used to provoke debate and educate the audience.
We read Cathy
Comments
Post a Comment