"People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart."
We have started to explore Brecht, since the play we are doing for our end of year show is The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertold Brecht. We started the class with a power point about Brecht, but I won't be going too much into details about it in this blog post, since I have done some research of my own HERE.
After the power point, we started to explore one of the main techniques of Brecht's, the Gest. Gest is basically the gestures an actor uses to define their character. The less is better in this case, since it is supposed to be a very satirical and clear point the actor is making with the gesture; it should show how they feel about their character and give the audience the impression if the character is 'good' or 'bad'. In the exercise we were give five different characters to explore individually and create gestures for them, showing how we view them. Then The different characters were:- Politician
- Dodgy car salesman
- Business man
- Call centre worker
- Defence barrister for a guilty murderer
After finding the movements, we had to simplify and clarify them, to create the Gest. It was interesting to see how different people had the same kind of movements for some of the characters, using the same gestures to show their opinions. For example, the car salesman had almost everyone rubbing their hands together to show their greed. Politician were often seen as two faced, showing their good side to the cameras and then turning away to show the disgust they are actually feeling.
After exploring the different characters on our own we were put into small groups to expand on on of the characters of our own choice. My group chose the Business man, who has helped a rival company to buy of the company he is working for, for a lot of profit. We really wanted to show a person who is cocky, proud but also cunning, looking up and down his competitors and evaluating them constantly. Our Gests were simply rubbing fingers together to show greed, fixing clothes to show vanity and simply standing with our hands on our hips to show power. Later, when another group showed just one Gest for the character, simply pulling their shirt forward with two hands and letting go, showing all of these in one gesture, it made clear to us all what the Gest was all about. Characters are not supposed to be hard to understand, but it is straight on political criticism on the character, as is pretty much else with Brecht. He would work for hours with his actors to find the perfect Gestus for their character. He believed that the Gestus showed a lot more than just the character's physicality, but also show the audience the character's social status and their social attitude and relationship with the characters around them.
After exploring the different characters on our own we were put into small groups to expand on on of the characters of our own choice. My group chose the Business man, who has helped a rival company to buy of the company he is working for, for a lot of profit. We really wanted to show a person who is cocky, proud but also cunning, looking up and down his competitors and evaluating them constantly. Our Gests were simply rubbing fingers together to show greed, fixing clothes to show vanity and simply standing with our hands on our hips to show power. Later, when another group showed just one Gest for the character, simply pulling their shirt forward with two hands and letting go, showing all of these in one gesture, it made clear to us all what the Gest was all about. Characters are not supposed to be hard to understand, but it is straight on political criticism on the character, as is pretty much else with Brecht. He would work for hours with his actors to find the perfect Gestus for their character. He believed that the Gestus showed a lot more than just the character's physicality, but also show the audience the character's social status and their social attitude and relationship with the characters around them.
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