Lesson 5 - Tuesday 29th November 2016

Thankfully Angelica was in today and so the rest of us (apart from Leane) showed her what we were doing and gave her a role. We managed to devise a section of our performance. We added freeze frames of Antigone looking over her two dead brother’s bodies in distress whilst Antigone and Creon do the status section that we devised last week.

We then went onto casting the roles for everyone:

Connor – A God, Guard, dead brother

Joe – Creon, dead brother

Angelica – Antigone, a type writer

Jacob - Creon

Leane - Antigone

Harmony – Antigone

Although Brecht liked to have females playing males and vice versa, our group came to the conclusion that Antigone should only be played by females due to the importance of the message being portrayed. That in itself being that the play contains a lead female role.

We then had to perform what we’d done so far to the class. Our general feedback was good and the way in which we displayed status seemed to be the outlined strong point however many of the audience were unsure of what was going on due to lack of context. Because of this, when we rehearsed later we added in text from earlier scenes including a conversation between Antigone and Ismene (her sister) about burying her brother and the law. Hopefully this will outline one of the themes being the state’s law.

I really like Izzie’s group when they performed because it was obvious that the group had really thought about what they wanted to deliver and had rehearsed in a sufficient way. The level of professionalism for our first sharing was very high and everyone knew what they were doing without hesitation. The group were very synchronised and used brechtian techniques (such as having an actor play a tree and also tell the audience that they are a tree whilst they’re doing it. This broke the forth wall and meant that objects were played by people).

We then finished reading through the play and decided that a nice way to end the piece could be to add in a suicide note written by Antigone but created on our own behalf. Angelica decided that she would be happy to write and perform the suicide note after I’d hung myself. I’m going to help her think of some things to put into the suicide note also.

(Strength: Use of Brechtian technique to demonstrate status is very effecting. Weakness: Lack of context confuses audience and makes performance contain no relevence)

Our aim for our next rehearsal is to figure out an effective way in which we can represent Antigone hanging herself.