developing the wolves of Willoughby chase and the style of Bertolt Brecht

Today we have went through a chorus section of the performance and messed about with some ideas to make the chorus interesting and still tell us what's going on. We had a couple of people on the stage blocks on different levels telling us little bits at a time and also doing small movements such as at one pint they mention waves flowing and everyone leans forward, this would create and interesting image and keep the chorus interesting and not tedious to watch. Just after the scene there is two girls talking (Bonnie and Sylvia) and whilst there talking there ice skating and the two actors playing them were practising ways of non naturalistic ways of skating whilst still being able to talk in the scene and convey emotion. Towards the end of the scene we decided we wanted to have some wolves played by real actors so we had a bunch of actors move around the set behind the two girls in a wolf like way to help bring the fear of the wolves seem more real when the two girls talk about them. I like what's going on with the physical side of the performance and I think we should keep going along this route but I don't think we should go over the top with physical stuff as it my take away form the actual performance. 


In the afternoon we looked at the drama practitioner Bertolt Brecht because his style is linked to the style of the performance. Bertolt liked to use placards which was a way of telling either what someone was thinking or what was really going or sometimes what was about to happen in a scene. Brecht like to make audiences laugh whilst having something horrific happen and sort of make the audience question themselves because they're laughing and really make them think about what's going on e.g. a woman could we on stage crying because something horrible has happened and a clown was behind her mocking her in a funny way. We messed around in small groups trying out quick performances whilst having placards. My group done two, the first one was two friends that were talking and one of them secretly hated his friend and was looking for an excuse to get away from him and the other guy was secretly gay and really wanted to tell his friend but didn't feel confident enough to. As the scene was on a third actor was holding placards and moving around showing what each character was thinking. We could definitely use placards in The wolves of Willoughby chase for things such as scene transitions and helping the audience understand what was going on or maybe we could have some people in the choruses using placards instead of talking to help add some variety of styles into the performance.