Blocking more scenes and Brecht lessons 'Verfremdungseffekt'

This past week we have mainly focused of two scenes, the ice skating scene and the scene were Bonnie gets hit and locked into a cupboard. We changed the ice skating scene around a bit because now we've decided were going to use people holding up cards and they will have projected images on to show the background or an object so now we have that we've had to change the way the ice skating scene will play out. I like the idea of projected images on cardboard because it would be easier to show were the scene is and there is all sorts of weird objects you could make with them like you could make people get closer together and put the cardboard pieces together into a square shape; you could project a cupboard onto that square of cardboard and there you go you have a theatrical cupboard. My only disagreement with this method is that there is such a big chance people could misplace were there cardboard is or the projection could miss the cardboard and I think it's to risky to take the chance. Overall we have decided to use the cardboard and projection technique because it seems more artistic and different; it also leans towards the Brecht's style of theatre which is what most of this performance is linked to. Brecht liked to use placards to tall what's going on or where the scene was and we do that with the projected images and the cardboards. 

This week we've also done another lesson in the Brecht style of theatre; this time we played around with stereotypes and how they can be used to help make characters. We used stereotypical characters and created something Brecht called the 'Verfremdungseffekt'. The Verfremdungseffekt is a technique were you have something obvious about to happen in a scene but then something completely different happens and creates a moment of astonishment and this would in turn make the audience think about what were trying to show/tell them. We had a couple of with our hoods up approach a man sat down and all surround him by sitting either side of him, at this point due to stereotypes the audience may think something bad may happen but then we all ask the man in a polite manner what time the next bus is and then we all realise it's time to go so we al run off stage. This would most likely cause the verfremdungseffekt and leave the audience stunned because they thought something bad was going to happen but then something completely different happened. The whole point of this exercise was to play around with stereotypes because stereotypes will help us get our characters in the wolves of Willoughby chase more accurate to people from that time era. My character in the performance is a house servant and by looking at what servants were like back then I can use that as a template to help develop and build my character 'James'. I've not fully developed James as a character because I need to do more research so that when I'm playing James that I'm believable to the audience.