Double - Refugee Devised - Blog 1 - 11/09/15

Bertolt Brecht

This lessons we started our work on Brecht. Bertolt Brecht was a German practitioner and a playwright. Brecht felt that audiences were too engrossed in the plays they were watching and were too immersed. He used countless techniques to create something called Epic Theatre. These techniques include: placards, fourth wall breaks, narration and third person thought tracks. We also had Ashley Clayton and Dan McKay (Year 13), join us in this lesson as they were able help us as they've done plenty of Brecht work.

We started by bringing together our knowledge on Brecht as some of us knew a lot more about Brecht than others. Lorna and I knew a lot about Brecht already as we spent a lot of time in GCSE learning Brecht. We listed lots of techniques and key ideas of Brechtian theatre.

Afterwards, we split the class into two groups (Me, Ollie, Rhiannon, and Lorna/ James, Charlie, Dan, Ash) and chose a children's story to act out. My group chose, "Little Red Hiding Hood" and the other group chose, "3 Little Pigs." Progressively, we were told to add more and more Brechtian techniques such as flashback, and third person narration to make our pieces much more Brechtian. We then performed our pieces to each other and received constructive criticism.

One of our Stimuli

Following this activity, we analysed some stimuli we were given; they were images of refugees. One was an image of evacuees children at a train station during WWII and the other an image of Asian refugees on a small boat. We were told to devise a piece using these stimuli. After much discussion and trial and error, we decided that a scripted piece would be a much better option.