Brecht’s theatre is described by Martin Esslin:
“We are so used to the concept of the stage as a faithful representation of the world that we tend to forget how recent a growth the naturalistic theatre is” (Esslin, 1993, 111).
I began to shape my piece around these ideas of theatre representing falseness, questioning how true something is when it is stood before us on stage. I took to stage a rough draft of my performance, in front of a small group of individuals.
The four stages were:
1. Sound – Sound – click on to retrieve sound
2. Video –
3. Script with me presenting – Script – stage version – click to retrieve script
4. Allowing the audience to dress me –
What did my audience think? I gathered comments after the performance to help the shaping of my final piece. The comments were as follows:
One audience member had an idea to project the video image of myself onto the stage presence of myself. This would create a cleaner, more impressive transition between the video and stage versions of performance. This difficult procedure will take practice and precision, so I am aiming to start work on this.
Another idea was to ‘play’ with the audience more in the stage version. I did include questions to the audience in the script, but a comment was made that I could extent and develop this, questioning the audience more than I did. One member of the audience suggested I look at the artist Tim Crouch, to gain inspiration of how to interact more with the audience.
Finally, I let the audience dress me at the end. I finished dressed as the audience wished me to be. One individual mentioned creating a character from the way I was dressed, an imagined character from the way I felt in the clothing I was wearing. This is an interesting idea and I will have a go at how this works in the performance space.
Overall the audience understood my intention, but commented that I need not mention it too often in the script; that I should leave them guessing more. I will be revising the script and adding more of the suggesting elements, to create a performance which plays around with the representations of the performer and the involvement the audience can have in the performance space.
Works Cited
Beastall, J. (2014) IMG 0524. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZHytX0cjZo&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 26 May 2014].
Esslin, M. (1993) Brecht: A choice of Evils. 4th edition. Methuen Drama: London.