Character Choices

During one excercise we were given given character names and occupations. Once given these names (my "name" was Cedric Horehore") we each individually had to interpret character physicality and voice based only on the name of the character. This helped my personally understand how Brecht presented his characters to his audience. During this excercise I learned that by making big character choices with physicality and voice, they help amplify the character's personality to the audience, for example I decided to make my characters walk very rigid, stiff and quick to express that he is a formal person, but also someone who is always in a rush and quite busy. I also gave the character a very forced grotesque smile to communicate that his smile is more of a formality rather than a reflection of his personality or how he feels, and that in fact, he is probably a unplesant man. I also realised that Brecht uses names to reflect character so that the audience do not have to figure out the character and therefore do not connect to the character itself.