We attempted to 'break the fourth wall' by using placards when Oliver and I walked down the catwalk. When Oliver presented himself Nicola held up the "Clap" sign. When I walked, she held the "Cringe" sign.
I would set myself the target of trying to make sure i don't cross the line between representing the stereotype and making fun of the stereotype. For example, in the speech that i addressed to the audience towards the end, i said that i was a "Fat fighter" By the end of the performance, after singing Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut, and eating Doritos while CHloe explained the dangers of Obesity. I may have crossed the line and started making fun of obese people. If I was pereforming to a group of people in Weight Watchers, this would obviously be too offensive. It no longer becomes a representation of obese people but I start mocking them.
We tried to show the two different extremes of characters by singing different songs. Oliver sang the song "I'm beautiful" Acting as the over confident person. I sang "Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut" to show that food was on my mind. The use of the 'Clap' and 'Cringe' placards showed the opinions of people these days. This was an effective way to get the message across and introduce the two difference people competing.
We could improve our performance by making it funnier and making the ending stronger. We showed that Oliver won the show but we did not explain the reason. If we had another scene where we addressed the audience directly and told them the reason that skinny woman are more attractive and accepted over obese people, it would be more effective.
I really enjoyed the Gay Village performance. The introduction of the characters with Amalissa, Georgia and Charlotte's posing was very funny and we understood their characters really well without them having to say very much. The song that they sang was catchy. We could have tried to define our characters more by introducing ourselves to the audience individually. Our group could have also used another narrator like Rebekka from the Safe Sex group. This would have helped follow the two competitors and reinforce our ideas even more.
We created our piece of Epic Theater, focused on the issue of gay marriage, using a number of brechtian techniques. We firstly presented our idea as a parody of the well known story – the Three Musketeers, however we named out the Three MuskeQueers. The sarcastic tone of this name continued through-out the performance, and we used comedy through-out the whole piece. We gave stage directions, Gods (God of he Gays), slightly altered the YMCA song and scene cross cutting. Although we used a narrator, I don’t think we used this technique to its full potential.
I believe the audience reacted well to the humor, both verbal and physical, in the piece and also understood our message, therefore how we presented the issue was effective.
However I don’t think the issue had enough effect on our audience. I do not think we had a clear resolution to the problem shown the audience, so whilst they understood that our opinion was gay marriage should be accepted, there was no shown progress given
Personally, I think the piece was a success, because of its funny nature and how we employed most techniques. Our physical theatre and stereotypical characters worked well because they were so well planned and easy to follow. However, the narrator role was not filled to the best of our group’s ability, and I think in the future more time should have been spent as a group to built the character and its position more.
I think basing our story on a fable made our piece very easy to understand and follow for the audience, whilst giving us a model to devise our piece on. The parody made our characters clear, and made bringing the issue into our piece simple
The most effective aspects were the physical theatre we employed, because it defined our characters for us, and allowed the sarcastic tone of the piece to have full effect. The issue we chose was also relevant to today, making it have more of an impact.
