First Impressions

First Impressions

When in our first lesson of the term we were introduced to Brecht i was excited about the term ahead. I thought as a style of acting Brecht would be very simplistic and fairly easy but in fact as the lesson progressed i discovered that Brechts teachings offer us as actors an opportunity not to just 'become' a character but to 'represent' one.  

Because in the last term we had studied Stanislavsky and naturalistic acting, this made my first impression of Brecht different to how it might have previously been is we had not done Stanislavsky. The reason for this is that when looking at brecht for the first time it is very different to any serious acting most people have ever done as in some ways it feels like we are back in primary school in drama. 

In the first lesson when we did some of the exercises to help us understand the verfremdungseffekt, exaggeration, narrative and 'gestus' my impressions were of a form of theatre that was going to be really fun and over the top but at the same time we understood that it would be to get a across a serious and political message.