Acting: Lesson Nine

Tuesday 2nd December

We read though the rest of Dr Korczak’s examples. Here are some of the techniques we find and the notes we made in class about the play.

As the story goes on Steff begins to turn against the resents the restriction lace on her by the government but she’s still attached to the orphanage where she lives and understand Dr Korczak’s points he makes. Steff is more practical minded, which prove that she’s the selfless and understanding young lady she  was  before Adzio come long, thinking about providing for the community whereas for Adzio is materialistic and selfish even though he has change Steff, she hasn't seem to change him to become more selfless.

Information is given out to the audience in scene21 by the actors not the characters, they talk about the orders given and it is also setting the scene of Cerniakov and his plan to help the orphans, how it fails which leads to his suicide. The dolls are used consistently as a distancing device e.g. the doll is broken before the character takes cyanide and dies, the benefit of doing this, is that the audience knows it about to help so they have no reason to feel sad and shocked. Playwright points out the humanity of the soldiers even though they are dolls. This shows how solider are as human as any of us. They are just following orders and know in their heart or head that they are doing wrong. The actors come out of the story to remind you it isn't real, it takes you out of the emotion, but somehow it is more emotion as it’s happened in real life and it just a remind of what happen to the children in times and how the right for children can about with the sacrifice and selfless of one man and his dreams. Korczak talks about being equal to children but can’t be honest with them about death at the end, which goes against one of the his right for the children which is “the right to desire, and claim, and ask” but he is being kind to the children and letting them have hope and dreams till the very end. Summary of political message at the end, a reminder to be thankful for Korczak, it’s relevant to a modern audience. Audience given the manifesto at the end as Brecht wanted the audience to actively think about messages of the play. This is a good idea as it keeps reminding the people in the audience of what happen and how they felt about this play.

The techniques that Brecht uses are Stereotypes, multiroling acting, distancing with dolls, direct address, montages. These will be use in our scene in which we were put ourselves in groups of three with one boy in each group. My group got the scene 15-17. We have the scene where Steff and Adzio kiss, to distance and take feeling out of the kiss I thought we could use the dolls which we help us remind the audience that we are in a play. 


My weakness from this lesson, are not commenting as much as I should but I feel like I did comment of important parts which I think I am glad of. 
My strength for this lesson would  be that I have a couple of good ideas of when it comes to thinking of the techniques to use in our scene.