Mr Kelly. Children's fables

Today we were all sent away at the start of the lesson to find more fables and short stories with morals for children, I found two stories. But after having a meeting with all my other classmates. We decided that my stories wouldn't be suitable to perform. And that it would be impossible to perform them because of where they are set. One of them being called " the ship" because the story is set on the sea. This instantly becomes a difficult one to perform. We finally had the idea of having toby and freya begin the "assembly" talking about healthy eating. The. Suddenly Tom and Meg come up with a massive story book. We also have the idea of getting all the children involved when we shout out magic words. I feel this will be great at keeping the children engaged. I think we may possibly be doing 3 stories. 'Jack and the beanstalk' 'goldilocks' and 'little red riding hood' we are going to be experimenting with mixing the 3 stories. Using different story telling techniques 

Shakespeare history

Elizabethan and Jacobean. 1576 James burbage. Had a son who was an actor. Got permission to build a theatre. Called " the theatre" 

Lord chamberlains men. Led by Richard burbage. Basically built a theatre for his son. Was friends with William Shakespeare. Who wrote the plays. 

Shalespeare: writers presenting ideas for a plot. Decide weather they liked it or not. Only had the Job as a writer. Didn't have a different job. He made money from writing plays. Created characters with certain actors in mind. Richard burbage led it all. He was a good actor and always had the leading role. As he got older. Shakespeare started writing focusing around older characters. So that's why we see this in Shakespeare's later writing. Each actor recieved a parchment with their dialogue on it. Not the full script. Rehearsals used to sort out details not in the scripts. Shakespeare's known for not having many stage directions. Actors worked out where they had to go/what they had to say. 1593 had to close because of the bubonic plague. Theatre was on same side of river as most well known places in London. The council banded public performances within the city limits 

1597: land was owned by a man called Giles Allen. Burbage opened negotiations to re-new the lease for the theatre. 

1597: Shakespeare's actors moved to the curtain theatre because of the failed negotiations for a new lease at the theatre. 

1598: rebuilt theatre over on south bank and renamed it the globe theatre, in 1599 

1603. Bubonic plague comes again and kills over 33,000 people. In 1608 the theatre closes. 

1613: fire during a performance of Henry VIII 

1614: rebuilt and tiled the roof.

Two years before Shakespeare's death. 

Indoor theatres were made used by " boy companies" performed indoors just once a week. Mostly boys who went to private school. Still performed good plays. Watched by family and local officials. A lot more stuff like props and money. 

Slightly more expensive than the globe. All about people with more money. 

Queen Elizabeth dies in 1603. King James took the throne

Jacobean period ran until 1625.

Jacobean theatre was dark and disturbing, sexual and violent.

As the economy declined. So did the delicacy of theatre performances, moved from outdoors to indoors, because of the changeable level. 

Two different types of plays 

Revenge plays: obscene and violent

Tragicomedies: dark humour. Sexual.

Two most produced Jacobean plays are " the duchess of malfi" and "the White devil". 

Religious people became in charge. Theatre started to decline. Parliament becomes in charge. The didn't like theatre so stopped it. Pulled down the globe theatre. And built houses there. In 1648 all theatres pulled down. Actors were arrested. Got fined for secretly watching performances. 12 years before theatre began again. 1649 King Charles. Was executed by the puritives. 

1953: Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord protector of England, all entertainment and celebration stopped. 

6th March 2015

In this lesson we focused again on telling stories. We had extra focus on movement. How we move and speak and how the audience can relate to it. We  also played a storytelling game which was really fun. Basically the teacher stood at the front and called out an age. For example pre school age up to the age of around 80 years old. So we had to basically tell a story, a story made up on the spot, so this also helped us with our improvisation skills, I also found that I was good at this, because I was confident in my movement and the way I was telling the story.  the teacher would change the age of who we are telling it to. So therefore we had to change the way we moved and spoke to fit the specific age group. I found this very fun but difficult. Because it's so hard to hold an entertaining story about flying dragons to sixth form boys, or elderly people. So it was challenging. We also had Toby stand at the front of the room and tell a story. Whilst he was telling it. The rest of the class had to improvise and create a movement that fit the story. This also helped our improvisation skills through movement. So I think this lesson was mostly focused on improvisation skills. And I feel it has improved my acting on many ways. I can now think of things on the spot quickly. Which will really help me when it comes to devising pieces. 

Physical theatre

physical theatre is anything that puts the human body at the centre of the story telling process. As a result it's usually abstract in style using movement in a stylised and representational way. 

DV8 Are an australian male heavy group, main practitioners of physical theatre. They are very famous. A lot of work they do takes place in London. Around the  country and internationally. Potential of working with movement. Do use dialogue and tell stories. Set stuff in site specific places. Relationship styled stories. Display effective ways of exploring emotions without it being cringy.  

Frantic Assembly. Created a lot of famous movements in productions like curious incident. Work a lot with the national theatre. Use quite a bit of dialogue. Work a lot more on script. 

Stylised  movement. A lot of action scenes end up being described. Shakespeare. But Kenneth Branagh made a new version in 2013 which was described as very good for its physical difference. It was very physical. People becoming things. 

Combining art forms. Other art forms such as music, dance and other media or visual images. Actors rely on there bodies more to be understood. Commedia dell'arte, stock characters e.g: goodie. Baddie. Hero. 

Techniques: mime-

Gesture- 

Status

Proximity

Stance

Harshness and tenderness

Movement

Not moving 

Mask work 

Dance work

Motif 

Contact improv 

Between two people. How you move around that person. Three basic rules absorb and impulse by partner 

Resist or ignore it 

To respond to it 

The piece we are doing is very clever. We are using a lot of movement pieces and use a lot of physical theatre. The story is mostly shown through movement. For example at one point we make a park, I become a bin at one point. And at another point I make a chair.  Me and Ashley use contact improvisation when he kills me. We do a small movement which looks very effective. We attack every scene with the emotion that is involved. Like in the scene where we are becoming over powered by Ashley and Harry. We all show frustration and anger in our movement and facial expressions. We have to over exaggerate our movement scenes because we don't have much dialogue. So the audience will have to understand the story line through the way we move and speak through movement, also in this scene Ashley and Harry don't move. Which is another technique showing there power. A lot of the movement pieces are like sequences. We go back to the same movement piece at many different points and sometimes app do the same movement at the same time! The performance went really well. We had really good feedback from the other group. We used the song "once upon a time, the battle of life and death", and it worked perfectly with the movement we were doing. And the fact that the music was extremely eerie and really dramatic. It fit the performance well,. I liked the way we for instance became a park. Or became an office. For instance in the part where we became a park, I became a bin, and in the office scene I became a chair.  We didn't use any props, just ourselfs. It was by far the performance I have enjoyed the most so far. And I'd love to do something like this again. Devised physical theatre is probably my favourite acting style.

Mr kelly. Story telling

Over the past week we have been studying storytelling, and how you story tell to younger children using techniques, i found it very difficult to start with, for example, when you are telling a story to someone who is very young, you have to do everything much bigger, for example pronunciation of words has to be way over the top so that they understand everything thats going on, and to remember to not use words that are too long or confusing, so we basically had to stand in line and over pronounce the vowles. A lot of my classmates found this difficult but we all managed to pull it off after a while 

I learnt that its all about keeping the audience, (in this case children) engaged, which is very difficult because children are quite easily distracted. so over the past few lessons we have learnt how to be more over the top, we worked also on movement skills swell, and how when we are acting we have to really go into detail with our facial expressions.

We were split up into two groups, then told to act out us telling the red riding hood story, and mr kelly after watching our devised pieces sat down with us and put on a cbeebies nighttime story from one of the professional story tellers, this really helped me to understand how using specific techniques keeps younger audiences engaged. It actually kept me engaged throughout the whole story! despite it being the most simple story ever!

After watching this video it helped me to understand that overacting is important when it comes to telling stories to younger audiences

Brecht

German playwright, Bertolt Brecht's ideas are very influential. He wanted to make the audience think, and used a range of devices to remind them that they were watching theatre and not real life.

Brecht was born in 1898 in Germany. During ww1 he became a medic and was appalled with the war, he didn't think it was right. He moved to Berlin in search of a career in theatre. In 1933 the nazi's came to Berlin so Brecht fled to america. He had his citizenship taken away from him by the nazi's. By 1941, he became a citizen of the united states of america. Americans did not like him at all due to the fact he was actually German. Because of this in 1947, he decided to move back to Europe  Where he created a company called, The Berliner Ensemble. From the details above we can see that Brecht lived through some very harsh times. Being forced out of Germany and America in the middle of the biggest war. Because of this, he had some very strong political views, which he liked to show through forms of theatre. He said everything how it was. He created a unique style of performance, his ideas were so revolutionary that he changed the theatrical landscape forever, he created "epic theatre", mirroring exactly what was happening in society. However he didn't want the audience to get emotionally involved with the characters, instead he wanted to make the audience think. Verfremdungseffect, its where you give the audience a chance to distance themselves from the play, so they aren't emotionally involved. However Brecht always broke the fourth rule. By talking to the audience, and reminding them chat it is just theatre and not actually real life. Which can be shown in many different ways e.g; Narration- coming out of character, speaking stage directions, directly addressing the audience, and using placards.
  
Although many of the concepts and practices involved in Brechtian epic theatre had been around for years, even centuries, Brecht unified them, developed the style, and popularized it. Epic theatre incorporates a mode of acting that utilises what he calls gestus. The epic form describes both a type of written drama and a methodological approach to the production of plays: "Its qualities of clear description and reporting and its use of choruses and projections as a means of commentary earned it the name 'epic'."

For the past week we have been studying Brecht and his work, we also are doing a small extract from the play "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", after seeing and studying Brechts work, we researched epic theatre, which is basically letting the audience know that its theatre work and not real life, for example in our piece, we label ourselves our characters names, by writing on placards who we play and sticking it to ourselves, like Brecht did. Also in our small play, we had kyle narrating everything that was going on, and we also read out the stage directions aswell.