AAS (9) - "Mother Courage" Performance

In today's lesson we performed our "Mother Courage" scene. Before performing it (to our teacher and a video camera) we ran through it quickly. In this run, we finally got our projection working. One slide of the projection was a paper ID from around the same time of when Anna Fierling was alive. This was projected when the Sergeant asks for her papers. The other slides of projection were black crosses, which we projected on to the curtains behind us when Hope looks at the pieces of paper with crosses on (the Sergeant's, Eilis', Swiss Cheese's and Kattrin's). The reason we included projection was because it was another Brechtian technique, which worked well in this scenario.

Also in this run we added in another prop. To represent the Sergeants helmet, we used a cardboard box. This was for the section that Hope asks the Sergeant for the helmet into which she puts the paper in to shuffle before drawing them one by one. This worked really well as Hope could move the papers about in the box rather than just holding paper. The paper we used were our name placards. Once Hope pulled our names out, James took them, screwed them up and threw them away to portray that he shall take us and the war will then crush us.

Our actual performance went really well on the whole. We all remembered where we needed to be, and the use of placards were really effective. We all used our body language effectively and the projection looked really good. However, when it came to quickly re-setting before our performance, we forgot to put the box in place (though thankfully we remembered everything else). Fortunately, as Charlie was the director and so not actually in the piece, he got the box and put it in a convenient place at the side - this was in a place that was out of shot of the camera and audience, and in a place that Lewis could just reach over and get it. Lewis and I made it a part of the performance by picking it up in an intrigued manner and fiddling with it before putting it where it should be. If we were to do the performance again, and if we had more time, we would have ensured we had everything in place and also we could have learned all of our lines off by heart.

I like the idea of Brecht's techniques but I don't particularly enjoying performing Brecht as I like to get deep into a role. I like the idea of breaking the fourth wall and being represantational but I like to be convincing in a role.