Lesson Notes Session 2

Brechtian Characters

We were each given a generic character name and title such as Veronic Vigar - a feminist. We then had to embody that character and move around the space. My character was called lucious Lucie - a barmaid. We then had to come up with a sort of catch phrase to help us get into character. Mine was 'would you like a little lemon wedge with that?'.

Not having anymore information than a name and title meant all our characters were being based on stereotypes. It would mean that our characters were designed to be representing a certain type of person in society as opposed an individual and three dimensional character with their own story.

It was easier to create my character when I allowed myself to push the character when I allowed myself to push the characters energy and let it be an unattractive character. This was difficult when we had to walk around the space alone and show our character to everyone. When I first did it and said my line my teacher said I needed to give more energy to it. I was told to higher my voice in order to make my character even more unappealing.

These kind of characters mean the audience don't spend time trying to work out who a character is and what  they are doing. This means it works off of the stereotypes the audience already have. Using characters like this with these kind of physical interpretations and title names the audience can know who they are straight away. This links to this idea that Brecht had of not needing the audience to emotionally connect with the characters or the story but why and how the story was happening. These characters therefore would help when trying to alienate the audience.


Gestus

This is the combination of gesture and attitude. It is an idea that Brecht used in his work that when you see a character onstage you can only tell their attitudes and opinions about something by how they react, and their reaction can be shown in a gesture.

We tried to understand this theory in lesson today. We were introduced to this idea by having someone in our class come up in front of everyone and march onstage then salute to the front. This told us as an audience immediately that this character onstage was a soldier. This was clear and obvious and we barely had to question it. This linked back to the work we did on making the physicality's of a character  obvious for the audience so they do not have to ponder who that character was. Despite knowing that this character was a soldier, we still did not know what his opinions were on anything, for example war.

The next level to trying to understand this was we brought on about 5 or 6 more people onto the stage and they were told to lie down and act dead. The soldier was then directed (without us as the audience being aware) to march onstage and to kick the bodies slightly as he walked through and then to complete his salute to the front.  This showed us that this character had a kind of nonchalance towards war. He seemed then to be quite cold hearted and negative as he didn't appear to have any kind of sympathy for these dead people and he seemed to just see them as bodies. The salute at the end and the kicks combined could begin to tell a story of him having completed an enemy attack and was now checking to see if the people were all dead, and saluting showed that they were therefore he had done his duty.

This was a clear way of explaining to me what Gestus was. If anything Gestus is a very simple and almost obvious idea which can sometimes make it seem more difficult when you consciously try and do it. As people we naturally use gestures to show our attitudes towards things for example if we were to try some food we didn't like we might spit it out. We took some time to watch examples other people created using the Brecht style characters we were given before. A good example I can think of was someone who was a hairdresser character came onstage and had someone sitting down on a chair as a customer. She looked at her hair and immediately put on gloves. This combined with a facial expression of disgust and cringing made it clear to us as the audience she was a hairdresser but her attitude towards this particular persons hair was that she didn't really want to be touching it. This meant we were questioning as an audience why doesn't she want to touch her hair? Is it this particular hair, is it dirty or is it because of a stigma that character has towards the type of person who's hair it is?