Creating a naturalistic scene was interesting as it helped me to understand how different Brecht's acting tools are. In our pair we explored the reactions of someone having Cancer. Watching everyone else's pieces was interesting as it was nice to see how everyone acted differently and a lot of the performances bought out an emotional response in me. The performance that affected me the most was Charlie and Nikki's. Their scene was exploring sibling's finding out their Mum had died. This was a very emotional scene as they really put their all into it. Revisiting the most climatic moment in our piece and revising it, so we learned the stage directions, was helpful for what we had to do next. This was to recreate that moment keeping the normal dialogue but we also had to speak all of our own stage directions as well. I found this difficult as it was so different from what we usually do and it felt very unnatural. This helped me to understand the Verfremdungseffekt effect as it helped me to distance myself from the character as were taking ourselves out of the situation to say what we were doing, effectively, stopping the flow of the scene. It also gave something familiar a strange effect. As it stopped the flow of the scene it was challenging as an actor to remember what we did and how we did it and what were supposed to be feeling.
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Brecht would use this to distance the audience and remind
them that the situation was not real. It also keeps the audience on their toes
as they have to concentrate more on what is going on so they don't get
completely lost. Distancing the audience also helps the audience to critique the
play and the social context. Rather than just 'getting lost' in the situation
they questioned and it made them get more involved in what was being said. I found
this technique intriguing but difficult to act on.
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