Friday 27th March

This week we had a rough idea on how we could start our performance for our children’s theatre piece. We then put the detail into this and completed this in full. The techniques that we are using in this opening scene are audience interaction, basic dialogue and a childish chant so they can remember. This will then hopefully get them involved with the story and get them ready for story time.

We then would create the scene for our first story “Little Red Riding Hood”. Our group was in charge of making the river. I had the idea that the river would be slanted so that one person would have a puppet on each arm with fishes on them pretending that they were under the sea. There would be then other people who are hidden behind the sheet with fishes on sticks which would also be shown over the river. This idea was not used due to another idea with the river being lifted up and everyone would be the fish underneath the river.

We then started the actual storyline for “Little Red”. We have a narrator and we have an ensemble that is in every scene creating the forest and other parts of the scenery. This will make the kids use their imagination with making the ensemble looking like the part of sceneries. We then decided that we would add a song. We then changed the words to:

“We’re off to see my grandma, my grandma who live in the woods,

  I hear she feels sick, and feel a bit ick, oh what am I going to do?

  I’ll take some treats into the woods, and make her feel better just like I should

  because, because, because, because, because, my name is little red riding hood.

  We’re off to see my grandma, my grandma who lives in the woods.”

I think that the children would recognise the tune and would enjoy the new lyrics and would be able to stay into their heads and it would help them with enjoying them.

Choosing our stories

The photo below shows a brainstorm of stories that we all came up in class that we could perform for primary school children after telling the children a basic synopsis so they understand what is going on. We  decided to take a short discussion we decided to take a vote on which three stories that we could do. The first story that everyone chose was "Jack and the Beanstalk". I think that this will be a really good idea because it has lots of characters and we could make almost like a musical as we could add song and dance.

The second story that was chosen was "Little Red Riding Hood" I think that this is really well known and we could also add the musical aspect. We could also add some other characters to male it more entertaining for all of the children.

The last story was a difficult decision for the group because me and a couple of others wanted t do "The Ugly Duckling" but others wanted to do "Goldilocks". I wanted to do "The Ugly Duckling" because I think that it could be funny and entertaining for the children. More people wanted to do "Goldilocks" because they though that the children wouldn't get confused and would feel that it could also be more song and dance orientated.

Story Telling

The photo shows below show a brainstorm of the theme that we could do our children theatre piece. We decided to choose to introduce the book. We started with Freya and Toby pretending to be teachers in a assembly to talk about healthy eating. After this, two people come in saying "We got the book!" leading to a change in the atmosphere in the room, this will then hopefully get all the children exited.

These two people say things like "are you bored boys and girls?" and "Shall we have some fun?" We then get them to put their hands in their air to make sure that everybody in the room gets exited. We will also be addressing the audience to get them involved so that they will be involved with us. Two people then sprinkle glitter over Freya and Toby so it looks like magic dust. There will also be a spell that they have to recite the spell for more audience participation to make the story move along.

Friday's lesson

Last lesson was our final week on work shopping techniques for storytelling. We brand all of the elements of the past few weeks  together. We started to make up a story with that class and everybody in the class would then follow on and tell a bit more of the story. We had to make sure that our story would appeal to different audiences. We had to focus on various age groups. Some exams were primary school children, teenage girls, teenage boys and men down the pub. This meant that our tone of voice would have to change and the content would have to change so the language would be relevant to the age or gender of the group to make it more suitable and interesting for the group.

After this we had to work more on movement. The class was split into two groups where one had to make a magical forest and the other had to make a magical undersea world. I had to make the undersea world. Our group started with a soundscape and which led to a short dance. We decided to go over the top with the facial expressions to make sure that we got our primary school target audience and make sure that they stay interested.

I liked what we did today as it gave us a whole overview of what we did during these workshops. This now means that we now how a better understanding on how to address our target audience and keep them interested.

Lesson logs

On or first lesson back, we looked at acting through our eyes to make our acting much more realistic to the audience on how we feel and how we are able to connect with them more. We had to think of a past experience and then look at a partner and make sure that only our eyes changed and none of our facial expressions has changed. The partner would point out if anything else had changed and you would have to revert back to your original position. We then made sure that we went into a scene with using our eyes the most and noticing that sometimes, the small features like the eyes can be more powerful than moving your whole body.

Next lesson we did speech. This his how you talk. We went into a line and we really emphasised on our vowels. We each had to say a vowel each and keep on doing this until everyone had said every vowel. We then had to say tongue twisters but act like we was saying it to like 10 year olds. We then got back into our line and said this one by one whilst overlapping each other making us think and we had to make sure that we was saying the tongue twisters right as well. We still had to make sure that we weretking like we was talking to 10 year olds. We then had to put an emotion of our choice into it aswell meaning that we had to go over the top to make sure that the audience would stay interested.

The next lesson, we started to act like  objects. We weren't allowed to think of what we were doing, we had to go straight into it. One person was like the feature of the area and the rest had to be parts of the area. Like if the feature was lava, the rest of us had to act like other things in a volcano. We could be like tumbling rocks or other lava or parts of a volcano. Others included being snowflakes, polar bears and penguins. We moved into objects to make it harder to imitate an animal. This helped be as an actor because when you act as an object, it's your interpretation on what you do. You just have to make sure you do it with confidence as nobody can tell you that it's wrong.

We had also looked at examples of storytelling to primary school children like when we watched a clip from the CBeebies where we watched the presenter tell the story. We then discussed the techniques that she used and talked about how we could put certain elements of that performence into ours.

Brecht evaluation

When we first got the scene from the script of the Caucasian circle, we decided that we would each just take a random character each and just do a complete read through of the whole script. Once we had discussed what we thought the scene was about, we set roles for everyone in the group.

I was given the roles of first woman, guest and old woman. I decided that each voice would have to be different because with Brecht everything is over the top meaning that if I was multi-rolling, it would have to be made obvious to the audience through my voice that it would be a different voice.

I decided to have my plaque taped to my front as the audience only really sees the front of me. My original idea was to cover up with my hand the roles I wasn't playing so the audience could see who I was playing by looking at the plaque. Although, this idea was good, I should of tried it out before the day of the show as when I was playing the person who's name was in the middle, I had to use both hands to cover-up the other roles. This meant I couldn't actually act at all because I was in a really awkward position and I was also reading off my script in this awkward position making it impossible for the audience to understand what my characters was doing. So instead the names of my characters were just wrote down on the plaque leaving the audience to guess the role I was playing.

I'm glad that we tried Brecht out because it is a different style of theatre that I haven't studied before. Although I do like over the top type of theatre sometimes, I don't want to do Brecht again because I didn't actually really like the scene that we did and I felt like the minimal props make the show look cheap and boring. I'm not saying a show needs a bug set for it to be important, I just at least expect some props. Also, I like it when the audience becomes emotionally attached to the characters so if anything does go wrong, the audience feels sorry for them. I also think that a character should wear a proper costume, even if it's scaled down to what it's actually meant to represent. I personally hope that I never have to do Brecht again. I can see why some would like him but I personally think that he goes too far with going the opposite to naturalistic theatre.

Brecht Workshop

Brecht was born in 1898 and was a medic. He then studied drama at  Munich University (where he studied to become a medic). He moved to Germany in 1925 to start a career in theatre  In 1933, with the rise of Hitler, he fled Germany to go to the USA and lost his German citizenship.

He got his American citizenship in 1941 where he decided to be a communist. He got sent to non-American house which led him to flee back to Germany in 1947. Here, he started a theatre company where he voiced what he thought through theatre.

He created something that is now known as epic theatre. At this point in time, naturalistic theatre was very popular but he decided to go completely against it. He wanted to cheer people up from the depressing war and make people think while watching his productions. He also didn't want his audience to connect or care for his characters. He didn't want his audience to feel emotional, he actually wanted the audience to be an emotional distance. He also, decided to break the fourth wall a lot.

Brecht died on 14 August 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58.

Brecht's Techniques:

• Narration
• Coming out of role
• Speak in stage directions
• Directly address the audience
• Uses plaques/signs
• Multi-rolling
• Minimal costumes, props and sets
• Symbolic props
• Symbolic lighting
• Song and dance
• Montage
• Non-linear narrative
• Gesture representation