3 Gestus to what we have been up to

Last week (7th - 11th May) was a very short week for me since we had the Monday and the Tuesday off costing us one lesson and for me since I was jetting off to the UK for the weekend I missed Friday too. Leaving me with just the double hour lesson on the Wednesday (9th May)

So I'm going to have to talk about Wednesday (9th). We began to study Gestus in class to show how much detail Brecht wanted in his pieces, which in turn is see as the "attitude of the charter". Meaning if Brecht were to freeze any moment of one of his pieces (i.e The Caucasian Chalk Circle) he wanted too see the attitude in that freeze. He wanted to see a woman who had taken a baby, saving it's life but putting hers at risk, giving up everything she loved and having to marry a pig of a man. All with Gestus, he wanted to see that history, that attitude on the character. So, naturally this was pretty darn hard for us.

First we were given titles which we had to apply a Gestus or attitude to. These 6 titles were

• War: Maker of Heroes
• The Waste of War
• Most popular kid in school
• Most unpopular kid in school
• Sincere Politician
• Insincere Politician 

Spencer and I worked on the first two, Georgia and Maria worked on the second and we all as an ensemble worked on the last 2. War: Maker of Heroes didn't go too well since we seemed to be giving off the the wrong attitude since it seemed biased towards one of the two of us. Whereas Waste of War seemed to go slightly better as it communicated all the Wastes of War with that one Frame. Also when we worked on the politician Gestus we realised how detailed you have to be with it, as Maria has mentioned in her previous blog, body language plays a key role even if it rotated slightly towards one person as well as contact between the two people. Everything in Gestus / attitude has to be so extremely clear so that the audience can look at it and realise automatically what is going on.

Then we did individual Gestus' for types of people read out such as unimpressed land lord, a bent copper, a foolish fireman and various others. Again everyone can imitate a fireman and police man but by adding a foolish fireman you have to think quickly to see how you can portray this clearly to an audience. Which is what was the key part for these 2 hours, showing with immense clarity what / who the character is to the audience.

That was pretty much it for this one lesson week for me. One quote that I took from this was "When does a pacifist become ready to kill?"

Richard #1