Unit 3: Epic Theatre (Bertolt Brecht) Study: Final Performance Evaluation

Part 1: The task overall was one that my group didn't have a problem with. Although the task itself was fairly easy going, there were elements of epic theatre that we had to include and we had restrictions as to what we could do we the script. Deciding the basic theme/ story of the play was simple as Bangladesh has a variety of important issues that needs awareness and issues that are of concern to everyone of our community. As we chose an issue that is associated with a lot of emotion, a challenge that we had as a group is to combat that emotion in our script writing, as well as conveying the dialogues. It was especially challenging for me as I was the victim in the scene. I had to look startled but at the same time not expose any emotion in my dialogues as that is against an element in epic theatre. 

Part 2: I would grade myself a 6 out of 8 for personal engagement. I think I showed good commitment throughout the task, and I didn't have to be asked several times to get on with the work, and I very often made suggestions to our group. My major contribution to the group was the montage. Personally, i'm not much of an animal person or someone who sympathizes with animal cruelty or issues of such, however when creating the montage I was very awed by the images I found online of animal cruelty. I decided that thats the subject I wanted to go with for the montage as the emotions of both situations related almost perfectly. I chose images that weren't exactly disturbing to look at, but images that portrayed Mina's emotional state because of the rape and abuse. I would score Mifrah a 7 out of 8 for personal engagement, I think she did a good job keeping us all motivated and she made the biggest contribution to our group- which was the script. She wrote the script on her own, taking suggestions from us and I think she combined our ideas and did an excellent job keeping it abrupt and straight to the point. I would score Shubham a 6 out of 8, he supported me throughout my contributions and he had a good level of commitment and motivation. 

Part 3: I would evaluate my group's final performance as an 8 out of 10. I think we were all able to elaborate on our idea/ theme and we interpreted it very well through our script by performing the dialogues effectively. During our performance, I personally thought we had a very good flow, which is the major thing that worked well. I definitely feel that our audience understood our issue and the importance and I am definite that they were able to relate it the society that we live in. Although most of our families are modern at the current state, there are still several families in Bangladesh where its normal to kick daughters of the house if they were raped and abused because the family looks down upon "impure" girls. I think we effectively created a performance of epic theatre because we included several elements that epic theatre contain. Some elements of epic theater include: not giving away everything to the audience in other words not spoon feeding them the story. Also, not using emotion while delivering the dialogues, and montage. I think these are the elements we portrayed in our scene effectively. 

Part 4: I decided to evaluate Ayat's group as there were lots of things I would change about it. I believe their group performed scene one from "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" text. First of all, their montage did not go because montage isn't meant to be an exact or similar portrayal of the situation instead it should be about a topic that isn't related but sends the same message as the story. Their images didn't really work with the text because it was being too direct and broad. I would grade them a 6 out of 10 for application because although they seemed to have tried they didn't really incorporate the elements of epic theatre effectively. Some of the characters portrayed too much emotion while delivering the dialogues which is something epic theatre is against as we don't want to "spoon feed" the audience. They were able to satisfactorily elaborate on the text and their skills were used  satisfactorily to the context of the scene, but it could however be better. I felt like I wasn't too engaged with the scene and that is something they could have improved upon. I also didn't understand their story, or the way they staged themselves. Although the idea is not to "spoon feed" the audience, its not to confuse the audience either, I was curious as to what the message was. So they couldn't effectively interpret a specific theme.