Today in Single, we turned our focus from Victorian theatre to Epic Theatre, created by Bertolt Brecht.
We started off the lesson in two groups, (Hope, Kat, Lorna, James, Ollie M & James/Ollie K, Charlie, Rob & I) and were asked to pick out of a range of quotes, which we think applies more to the theatre we enjoyed watching today. The quote my group chose was, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it." We decided to go with this quote because it can be interpreted in different ways which please different people in the group. Some of us saw this as to use a hammer to break this mirror image of reality however some of us took a more Brechtinian approach to this quote and thought of how Brecht always wanted to convey an image through his plays which we would carry forward into our day to day lives; hence "a hammer with which to shape it."
We next watched a short powerpoint about the history of Brecht and how he went from a medic in World War One to being one of the most well known practitioners of all time.
After a short exercise detailing what the terms Communism and Fascism meant (we stood on different ends of the room to judge whether we thought figures such as Hitler and Karl Marx were communists or fascists) we were given a research task. We were asked to research Brecht's techniques and conventions and how this affected his performances.
Next lesson, we will finish our research and present our findings.
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