Devised piece coursework. When I saw the stimulus I first believed it to be a dirty dress, that had been washed up onto the shore of a beach

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Our assignment for our exam was to create our own devised piece from a stimulus given to us by the exam board. When I saw the stimulus I first believed it to be a dirty dress, that had been washed up onto the shore of a beach. After this the group began to brainstorm possible ideas.

Initially, our first idea was to do something based on the titantic as the idea of the shore had led us to the ocean, the to boats and eventually to the Titanic. We started off with our idea of the Titanic, but decided to delve further into it, so from titanic we moved to shoddy workman ship as that was reason we decided the Titanic sunk (With the exception of the ice burg, of course). From shoddy work man ship we got rushed production due to greed. For two weeks we worked on a peice to do with greed which soon turned into sweatshops, unfortunately the idea did not work for us, because although we had managed to produce three tableaux' we did no longer liked the idea and came to the conclusion that we should change it.

After some more heavy duty thinking we came up with the idea of a fairytale for we managed to transform this disgusting, washed up dress into a beautiful dress fit for a princess, and so, we went from there. We had vaguely used the idea in a previous piece and after some discussion we concluded that using the idea of a fairytale would be a good one as it would be easily recognisable for our audience, this also would give us a means to 'twist' the story in ored to get our message across to our audience.

We chose Brecht as our practioner so we could expand our personal skills and knowledge by performing and learning about his practices. Brecht's techniques would enable us to educate the audience as to understand the point of our theme (Is blood thicker than water?). Brecht's practices expanded our own thoughts and feelings, it also forced us to look at the world in a rather different manner. Overall it was very enlightening.

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After some research we learnt that one of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect"). Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense, and speaking the stage directions out loud. Before we revised our performance and remodeled parts of it, we sung certain lines rather than just speaking them, this would alienate the audience as it wouldn't get ...

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