Evaluation of our Performance

As an ensemble, I feel we engaged well with Brechtian techniques and they were successful at getting the audience to question the society they live. When we were rehearsing I was concerned that we didn't know the lines properly, especially the lines we said together, but I think it got better and snappier in the actual performance.

The fact we performed inside rather than outside made projecting our voices and clarifying meaning to the audience easier. However, I think having the physical distance from the audience added to getting them step back from the piece. When we did it inside, I feel the audience may have felt more immersed in the piece, and this would not have encouraged the audience to want to change things in society.

I think we dealt with the change of space very well because we went through the piece quickly and made changes to the blocking, collectively coming up with ideas. In a sense, even this was Brechtian and I feel this shows we had all learnt about Brecht's technique and it helped us create good theatre.

The Brechtian elements we used were successful in our piece. The signs that said things like 'Stop being so emotional' helped the audience step back from the action because they were confronted with a message outside of the play that addressed the factual content of the piece rather than the emotional content.
The human microphone was Brechtian because chorally speaking made the audience directly confront the idea that these ideas weren't just held by the parent and child in the piece, but by the masses. It is also a very unnaturalistic way of speaking, so this also distances the audience from being emmersed in the emotion of the words.
The part when Shannon came out of the action and repeated the line to the audience out of character was Brechtian because it reminded them that what they were saying is commenting on society and their emotion is not important in this case.
The images we created with our bodies to express what was said and the dynamic that was presented by the parents on stage was an effective technique to use because it allowed the audience to stand back and analyse what is going on the picture like looking at a photograph or a painting.

However, I think our piece focused very heavily on keeping to the text and I feel we could have experimented with the text and the issues risen in the text. With Sarah Goodhall's group's I feel that they looked at real people in society and created short sketches about them that was outside the context of the actual play but helped the audience draw similarities to the world of the play and reality.

I thought Catherine performed well because she learnt the lines well and had clearly developed the gestus of her character which we worked off in the ensemble by copying the gestures she made. She also referred to the parents when she spoke which reminded the audience of the masses the argument were representing. She also got incredibly angry and she let this fuel how she moved around the stage, which was engaging to watch.

I thought Josh also made interesting choices with his voice that worked really well inside for the actual performance. He did the American accent well and really played with the sarcastic parent stereotype in his facial expressions and small sharp movements he used to clarify aspects of what he was saying.

I think I performed well in the piece because I engaged with the parents as I spoke and I made clear character choices in how I spoke and the physicality of my character who had her arms folded because I felt this presented the defensive parent stereotype in society I wanted to explore.

We could have looked at other situations where the parent-child argument has happened in the past in the audience's reality. There was a moment in the play when the Parent spoke about the ancestors of the past and the amount of effort they put into going to see places in comparison to the child. I feel this moment was lost because we didn't look at the images we could create from this part of the text with our bodies like other moments in the play.