The first group that i think did really well was Georgia's and Amalissa's. Their characters were much more obvious about who they were and what they were representing. The way they delivered their lines delivered with full enthusiasim and obvioiusness about them being 'gay'. Another group I really liked was Ryan's and Jasmin's. I think their play really worked and was really funny because they chose a really familiar story that everyone knows 'Adam and Eve' and the characters 'out there'. They had adapted their characters Adam, Eve and God and made them quite modern and different which suprised the audience and made them laugh.
Many Brechtian techniques were explored to create an Epic Theatre. Our group chose "Bullying" as a social improvement topic that is to be conveyed to the audience through a performance.We also used a fairy tale; "cinderella" as a juxtapose parody. Humour was the biggest genre within the play, there was also the use of narrators, individuals, stage directions and projections. Each character has their own representation with their tags; E.g. "Gods". Therefore, the comic techniques were used along with stereotypes. We also used re-run as a way of repetition and clearance to the audience. Music were also used to support our parody acts, dance and moments of still images (geste). By using most of the Brechtian techniques; projections, verfremdungseffekt, geste and music, we were able to communicate well enough with our audience.
I thought that our group used the Brechtian techniques well enough for our audience to understand what we were trying to do. There were moments where there was an obvious reaction from the audience, it can be told if they were engaged or even understood our message through their laughter of our parody. However, there were also many moments where we didn't get a reaction we wanted. It was either due to a lack of organisation or clearance for that scene. According to other group members, they particularly liked the dance sequence and other parody acts. However, they also mentioned our disorganisation for certain scenes. I agreed with their comments and although we thought the play was just good enough, I believe it could be better if we used a few other techniques; montage and design. Also, if we were a bit more organised rather than just concentrating on ideas for different scenes, I think we could have made a even bigger impact.
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.
