My group, 4.5F, had our practical assessment a few days back. In our piece, we wanted the audience to realize that it is difficult for one to reconcile all our different identities. Our aim was to help them reflect on and think about the issues we were presenting and not be emotionally caught up in the piece. Also, our piece was a response to the Ant Play, an anti-war play. In the Ant Play, there was limited perception of war and we felt that the characters were too one-dimensional. Characters seems to be merely blindly following orders which was the main reason why we did not agree with in the war context. Our group felt that human would surely have conflicting opinions and might be facing individual problems. The Ant Play was more focused on the war itself, whereas, we wanted to shift the focus on the characters to portray the theme of identities in war. As a result, we looked into practitioners who used war as a context to comment on society and that is where we decided on Bertolt Brecht.
We had two layers of techniques to the acting style in Brecht. Firstly, we used the Stanislavski Method of "becoming" the character and using the Magic 'IF', in which we thought of how we would react/behave if were the character. This is needed in order for us to understand our characters even better and know his/her background. However, one of Brecht's acting technique was to PRESENT the characters instead of BEING the characters. Hence, during rehearsals, each of us read our script in the 3rd person's view - the use of she/he instead of I. This allowed us to be emotionally detached from our character so that we can PRESENT the characters and also switch roles quickly.
One unique key feature we supplemented was the use of Physical Theatre. This was the main problem in our assessment as we were unable to bridge the link between the principles of Brecht and Physical theatre. Brecht elements were minimally used and it was difficult to balance/merge Brecht's style and Physical Theatre. Hence, we decided to look back on previous productions which has inspired/influenced us. One significant piece was "Woyzeck" by The Sadari Movement Laboratory.
We were inspired by The Sadari Movement Laboratory's use of physical theatre and chairs in the play "Woyzeck" and decided to use their creative process and style as a guideline for ours. This is a short clip of their performance:
The Sadari Movement Laboratory made use of chairs as their key prop in the entire play consistently which was a symbolic representation of Woyzeck's minscape and emotions. It was interesting to see how the could use chairs to create so many different structures that could bring out the range of emotions and effects. It was simple but creative. Their movements were precise and accurate, and their ensemble was extremely tight and synchronized. The choreography was entertaining and could show what Woyzeck was feeling and the different states of emotions at each moment. Chairs were used to shape environment, bodies, background, emotions and situations. They made the piece more dynamic.
(photos are too large, unable to see full image. Alternative source: http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?pid=5942797&id=736791139)
We decided to use their style of performance and hence have to further to research on their use of Jazz music and multimedia.
Lastly, we found it difficult to contextualize war incidents to a Singaporean audience because they have never been to a war. We had to bridge more links between our performance vision to the modern Singaporean audience to either create awareness and lesson learnt after watching our performance.
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