Brechtian Quotes

I believe Brecht believed that you are who you are no matter what façade you might present to the outside world, you can not change or part with what makes you, you.

Brecht was an Marxist therefore he believed in a classless society. My interpretation of this quote is that we all learn from each other because we all come from different types of life and upbringing, one where you could learn from someone of  a lesser class of yourself or a younger age but a wise mind.

Inadequate - Unable to deal with a situation or with life.

This took me a while to understand the concept of the quote but I feel as though Brecht is saying we shouldn't be afraid to die but we should be afraid of living a life which is not fulfilled.
Because death is the same as an inadequate life -nothingness.

In my opinion this has always been society, in the past, in the present and it will be in our future. People often work hard to achieve an end goal that they think will complete them and make them happy and it just might but temporarily. People chase after fame and fortune and love but until you find yourself you will never be truly happy alone or with someone else ,happiness isn't materialistic, it's within you and it may be the simplest things like having a family meal.

Melissa Mchiney Rehearsal 4: Development Of Physicality

Brecht always wanted to keep his audience thinking throughout the whole duration of his plays. His plays strived for social awareness to provoke social change. However Brecht's plays were far from boring. Brecht learned that he could engage the audience into thinking through entertainment even if there is a serious subliminal message behind it. This technique is called Spass. We use spass to break the tension after Melissa is first introduced to the audience by being thrown on to the stage. While Melissa is on the floor trying to comprehend her whereabouts, the rest of the cast or society, play a game with her. We creep away over exaggerating each movement using the whole of our bodies and immediately freeze when Melissa turns to look at us- just missing us in action. This is amusing to the audience because it's child's play, they can see what Melissa can't, therefore the cast and the audience share that secret. This is used in the beginning to quickly stop the audience from following Melissa on an emotional journey as they would immediately feed in to why she has been thrown on to the stage and sympathise with her. Meanwhile the audience is laughing, they are thinking, they know that Melissa is being isolated and mistreated they just don't know why just yet.

What is working well in rehearsals is the class is able to be very imaginative with the type of movement we use when creeping away from Melissa. We learned to experiment with how we can make use of every part of our body and make every movement stylised. This creates a better picture an emphasises just how much we are mocking Melissa. A personal challenge for myself is spatial
awareness, every time we rehearse this piece every one's movement changes. The aim is to keep watch of Melissa not only to see when she turns so we know our cue to freeze but to show the audience that we think we are having fun with her and it is all a game to us. I've stumbled on people behind me as I am moving back because I can not see behind me. How I have challenged this problem is making my first movement is to quickly look back before I decide on my next movement. By doing this I should be able to get in position before Melissa turns her head again and not be blocking someone else or causing any incidents to myself or others.

Melissa Mchiney Rehearsal Blog 3: Creating A Scene

In the aim to work better as a class, the class was split into three smaller groups. Each group was formed of people that doesn't usually work together, this was an opportunity to familiarize ourselves with one another and learn from one another different ways to approach tasks given and see different aspects of thinking. My group consisted of myself, Ryanne,Leigham,Matas and Remel.

The task given was to directly show Melissa being persecuted by her peers, keeping in mind our issue based tableau lessons and what we had learn't from them ie; physicality,abstract movement,characterization. What worked well for us was that our creative ideas were flowing well and because of our previous experience of bad time management, we were able to listen to each other and make constructive use of our time. The only two problems we faced was to figure out how to link two ideas together so that it made sense and how to safely execute a lift.The primary idea of our scene was to show Melissa (myself) being her own worst enemy. In the beginning of the short scene she is held captive by her own demons,(Ryanne and Leigham) pulling her arms back, exposing her to the world. Her feet are weighed down by all the taunts (Remel and Mataz holding down my feet) she'd been getting from society. She exhales heavily and her weights insync with her exhale to. As she escapes these weights, she is lifted off her feet and fights to find the ground.She falls lands thinking it is over, she stands and walks to a mirror to see her reflection, however she is frightened as her reflection is extorted (Leigham holds Ryanne wrapped around his waste). This is to show how Melissa now sees herself - a freak. Melissa falls back and is literally kicked while she is down.The scene ends with Melissa lying on the floor, defeated and the demons smiling looking down on her. The reason why the lifts were a problem for us was because when Remel picks me up and I'm meant to land forward falling onto Matas' back however I was worried that it was hurting Matas although he said he was managing I felt that the landing was not steady and may cause an accident. Now the second lift also caused concern because Leigham could not carry Ryanne and in order for it to work Leigham would have to stand strong. The way we approached this was we kept practising, each time mentally logging what was not working or what could be better before approaching it again.Every one had to feel completely safe and comfortable. 

Melissa Mchiney Rehearsal Blog 2: Working As A Team

The video above is evidence of an idea myself and Malachi wanted to contribute to the piece. This would be for the scene where the doctor visits Melissa and emphasises to her that he can fix her 'deformity'. This is an important part of the piece that the audience should pay attention to because the dialect is very manipulative and quite disturbing when modernizing it. We wanted to be very literal and demonstrate this in a very abstract and creative way, with the tech and sound it could've been very powerful. To me it shows Melissa as innocent as she is ;being persuaded and deluded by the doctor (or society) into thinking she's inhuman and so without thinking she runs towards this false hope for change and it traps her and breaks her mentally.

In this rehearsal the class had to work together cohesively to create physical and abstract movement for two whole pages of the script to 'The Tragic Tale Of Melissa Mchiney McNormous McWhale'.What was working well was our drive to get things done, but that was probably our downfall as well. Without Justin's directions, working as a group was challenging, we struggled to work cohesively and choose ideas. We wasn't listening to each other and we weren't processing ideas that were being shared. So people began to feel frustrated because they wanted to have input on what we all will be doing - fairly enough as we get graded individually for our efforts. We had to identify what was hindering us from moving forward and that was we weren't wholly allowing an idea to pan out, so ideas were overlapping and evidently nothing actually was getting done and time was being wasted. The way we approached this problem was by splitting the class in to groups of two and we would then separately come up with a sequence of movement and show it to the rest of the class in ten minutes. This is where myself and Malachi's idea came in (video above) we would then as a company would decide which sequence is best fitted for that scene. After showing everyone's pieces most of the ideas shared were combined to create that scene. Our idea wasn't used because the rest of the class felt not everyone could achieve the lift. We decided to do the movement in unison;for it to work effectively we generalized the characters (implementing Brecht here) making all the girls 'Melissa' and all the boys 'the doctor'. By doing this the audience should be able to follow a story and actually see Melissa being persecuted.

Below is the lines to the scene we created movement for :

CHORUS #2: Then one fateful night, a strange-looking joe

Slipped into her dressing room after a show.

MELISSA: Who are you?

STRANGER: Don’t be frightened. I’ve come to correct

Your terrible monstrous ginormous defect!

MELISSA: My defect?

STRANGER: Your backside! Your deformed hindquarter!

With my skills I can make it considerably shorter!

MELISSA: But people here love me. They built me a statue.

STRANGER: That statue is only intended to mock you!

Can’t you see you’re a monster! A freakish mutation!

MELISSA: Go away!

STRANGER: Not until I have offered salvation!

I can fix you. You see, I’m a world-renowned surgeon.

My name is Dr. Sylvester McPurgeon.

I can take your deformity—cut it just so

And voila! You’ll look just like Bridgette Bardot!

Here’s my card. You may call any time, night or day

The show is supposed to be quite humorous, so this is the reason why we had to highlight this section to the audience, shining light on the darkness within the scene. The Dr is an intruder! He 'slipped into her dressing room'- he's breaking an entering and really the audience should be alarmed. In this scene we see the doctor invading Melissa's personal space and making her feel very uncomfortable which would then make the audience feel uncomfortable. Which is the aim of Brecht, to break the audience out of the illusion and make them face the reality of what is actually being presented.We use the Brechtian technique gestus here, as we wanted to show were not meant to play the character but to represent the type of people we were. We also use Gestus with social comment as the Dr slips into Melissa's room she is silent with fear for more than five seconds;she does not scream - as you might, meeting an intruder. This represents the automatic power the Dr held over Melissa, filling her body with fear as she does not yet know what he is capable of.

Melissa Mchiney Rehearsal Blog 1:Issue Based Tableaus

In class we created eight issue based tableaus using the stimulus of our project's theme which is persecution.We split the class into two smaller groups and looked in the newspaper for different forms of persecution that appears in everyday life. My group chose to focus on persecution in a workplace, we also looked at the victim not only being a women but a man as well - this shows the audience another aspect of persecution, forcing the audience to think differently this is also an example of anti-sexism demonstrating that any one can feel persecuted. Implementing Brecht in our images, we had to devise stylised movement including transitions displaying our professional level of knowledge of Brecht, being in second year. In my opinion we executed this well in rehearsals and quickly grew more comfortable experimenting physically with one another which evidently made our tableaus more effective.When we were first given the task to create eight tableaus, I feel as though it challenged the group to think more in depth about what it means to be persecuted and how we could portray this in our work, avoiding simple and basic movement. For me this meant a lot of time had been wasted more on thinking rather than producing and I worried that this would effect the outcome and quality of our work in a poor way ; we were over thinking because we were trying really hard to be different and abstract . To resolve this we had to finally decide on one idea and develop that one idea. This helped us because we were then able to use our time more constructively and produce more work and we could judge as an ensemble if that idea was working or not, then we had time to change it if need be. Brecht was successfully implemented in our tableaus because we did not put our tableaus in chronological order, as Brecht shows are usually random and not scene after scene. This reminded the audience that they are watching a play as it stopped the flow of things and captured their attention giving them a chance to process the information. We also use placards as part of the 'alienation effect'. The placards are not to comment on the action but further deepen the audiences understanding of what we were showing them. We directly spoke to the audience,which broke the fourth wall and broke the audience out of any illusion that what they were being shown was real, forcing them to see the reality of it all. Brechtian demonstration of character is relevant because although we have to detach ourselves from being the character, we still have to use characterisation and gestus to keep the audience engaged.

The video below is a reconstruction of part of the piece we made,the video shows me playing the woman being persecuted by a man (Malachi). Because the scene is quite intimate and daring, it grasps the audiences attention and makes them feel uncomfortable. It also makes the audience aware about this type of persecution and may give them a wider thought about persecution in an office. Personally it gave me imagery of a woman being hugged, but inappropriate enough for her to feel uncomfortable and the video is an image of how its making her feel in her mind.

(please be informed that the video below has been sped up because the full file will not fit)