Gestus is an acting technique which was created by Bertolt Brecht. Gestus combines gestures and attitudes to help us explore into detail the relationships between characters or how they feel.
The actors must do actions so that the audiences maintain a clearly understand what is trying to be shown.The actors will then add attitude to the actions, giving more depth to the character and story. This will have an effect on the audience, allowing them to make their own opinions and decisions about each character.
I learnt a lot more about Gestus and how it works after we had a demonstration from two of my classmates...Ivory and Josh. They played out the relationship between a snob and a servant which was really interesting to watch. Ivory was seated on a chair with her back straight, legs crossed and nose up to portray the fact that she had a sense of power. Ivory also added a gesture to portray her character even furthur, waving her hand around to get the servants attention. However, Josh's portrayed his character a lot differently. Firstly, he focused on his posture by slumping his back and walking slowly with his head up to show his awareness and alert personality he must have as a servant. When approaching Ivory, he walked quicker which enabled us as an audience to see a clear contrast between characters. When Josh arrived, Ivory did not look at Josh and simply used one hand gesture to tell him what she wanted. I feel that watching Ivory portray her character helped me to understand Gestus in a simple form. She created her sense of power by not even looking at Josh, which means that she disrespects him. However, Josh constantly maintained eye contact with Ivory. He kept his distance when approaching and even slightly hesitated which told us as the audience that Josh may feel slightly manipulated by Ivory. This all gave me a clear understanding of Gestus and i believe that Brecht created this in order to get the audience involved in making their own opinions.
No comments:
Post a Comment