Tuesday 5th November 2013. Lesson 2. Hours 3 and 4.

Lesson 3 and 4.

In lesson 3 and 4 we first discussed the deal of left wing right wing.
Here is a diagram which could come in helpful to understanding left wing, right wing. 

To explain further:
Left wing: are usually progressive in nature, they look to the future, aim to support those who cannot support themselves, are idealist and believe in equality. People who are left wing believe in taxation to redistribute opportunity and wealth - things like a national health service, and job seeker’s allowance are fundamentally left wing ideas. They believe in equality over the freedom to fail.
Right wing: value tradition, they are about equity, survival of the fittest, and they believe in economic freedom. They typically believe that business should not be regulated, and that we should all look after ourselves. Right wing people tend believe they should not have to pay for someone else’s education or health service. They believe in freedom to succeed over equality.

We then read the play 'Amanda' written by Kieran Hurley as part of Theatre Uncut. My initial thoughts on the play were although it was very unlike the naturalistic Stanislavsky work we did last term there was still an underlying element of truth in the play. The thoughts voiced in her head are similar to what many stress over. 

Moving on from this we talked about ways to perform this, we talked about the ideas of theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht and we moved on to exercises in which we could explore his ideas. 

We discussed whilst Stanislavsky would have us thinking about the what when who and why, Brecht would have us embody the character without thinking of this. Just physically becoming them. Therefore we walked around the space and learnt how to physically become certain characters. 
In this first picture we created an old man, to do this we bent our knees bent forward 

 and put our head up- this physically made us an old person without having to think of the deeper questions surrounding the character. 

 In this picture the boys became soldiers. By doing this they had to think of the small physical traits, for example, soldiers are proud to serve their country and this would come through by them tilting their heads slightly upwards which immediately shows their proudness. Also soldiers are very proper and this is portrayed by them standing straight. 

Finally in this pictured we portrayed alcoholics, with our hips thrust forward, a beer in our hands and our head on our chest. This made our characters so clear we didn't even need to stumble or slur our words to show we were drunk.





The importance of this was to work on our physicality as this was of most importance. After this we made a set of freeze frames portraying characters using only our physical bodies to portray what happened. 
The girls were at a ladies lunch- this was portrayed by a group of ladies with high heads (to show class) and open gestures (to show happiness), the next freeze was of a woman getting news her husband died at war, each woman slightly caved in physically to show shock and unhappiness and in the final freeze, the woman who's husband died was very low to show her depression and the rest of the woman were slightly turned away.

This was all to learn about Gestus- which carries the sense of a combination of physical gesture and "gist" or attitude. It is a means by which "an attitude or single aspect of an attitude" is revealed.