Hollie walker
Understanding Berkoff.
Stephen Berkoff is a strong believer in a very physical extravagant form of theatre. Designed to shock his audience and make them question society and themselves, rather than spoon feeding them with pure feel good theatre that they can simply accept. He incorporates all he has learnt throughout his years as a dance, drama and mime student into his pieces in order to create a very well rounded piece of drama which is highly choreographed down to the last step. For example in " the trial" all the actors and actresses move in perfect time and very smoothly, almost dance like, just more rigid in their posture. We also see elements of mime in some of his pieces such as Metamorphosis, when the family eat breakfast as a unit; this created a very surreal effect for the audience and makes the idea that the family are one organism more clear to them. Berkoff enjoyed using these techniques in pieces in order to distance the themes of the play from being blatantly related to current social issues or beliefs but there are clear links which can be made if you look at the general idea. Berkoff fed off of his past and all the historical events he lived through such as World War II to create very cutting edge pieces on taboo subjects, using the same form of techniques Shakespeare did in not making immediate links but leaving the interpretation to the audience.
Our chosen pieces a whole blue sky can easily be devised into the style of Stephen Berkoff as the play is pure narration almost like a chorus. The pieces hints on current social issues of a dysfunctional marriage and a lack of intimacy in a relationship, but by using a chorus of narrators the theme is not explicitly portrayed to the audience as gaps are left for them to guess as to why this marriage isn’t working. In particular, the section we use where a character is created by the narrators and this character explains to the audience how she regrets marrying as she feels so undesirable. This part we are looking to repeat and play in two different ways which is very much a Berkoff technique as we are playing around with the time of the piece in order to put clear emphasis on how this marriage is making the woman feel. Another technique of Berkoffs we wanted to use a lot is the breaking of the fourth wall, we want to involve our audience in the piece and make them feel uncomfortable to bring across the pain and discomfort the woman feels in their relationship, make them see how real the topic is and not let them just sit back and enjoy a piece of drama they can forget about when they walk out. We are aiming to make our audience question what she should do, we are going to try to involve them by addressing them as a character in the play as her son Bobby to make them forget they are watching drama and make them feel highly vulnerable.
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Berkoff Dramatic Intentions
We chose to use "A Whole Blue Sky" as our drama piece as we believe it is highly influenced by Berkoff. We want our piece to evoke many thoughts and feeling from our audience during and after the piece. In an attempt to do so we chose to focus on the pain of the Mother, as her struggling through a difficult marriage is hinted throughout but we never find out what it is directly that makes her want to "pack and leave". We decided to interpret the play as the lines are very vague and so we would show how she hurts and what it is that hurts her exactly all through suggestive actions. For example we keep referring back to a puppet scene in order to demonstrate how her husband is controlling and has her trapped, we use this when the mother performs a piece directly the Bobby, whom we have decided to cast the audience as, and so it is performed as a duologue in order to make the audience feel more involved, forming an attachment between the audience and the woman. By keeping it vague it leaves the piece open to the audience’s interpretation and so it is more likely that they will relate it to themselves or something they know making the piece more personal and creating more sympathy towards the woman and her situation. By using mime with the puppets we make our piece very much in the style of Berkoff as he used a lot of mime and the puppets both only use mime in the first piece. We also refer back to our narrator stances and use chorus a lot when we are out of character which is also in the style of Berkoff as this distances us from the audience, and only create an emotional attachment when we become the characters again. Berkoff believed very strongly in "In yer face" theatre which shocks the audience and gets them more involved than what they'd usually expect, we aim to do this as well but showing the harsh reality of the woman's life and the painful emotions she goes through, also by assigning the audience the character of Bobby we involve them more than what they would probably like. This all shapes our piece by creating the general idea of a very pained woman, or person who has made the wrong decisions in life and has ended up wasting it. It shapes the frame of a general emotion with moments of distance, when we are the narrators being completely two dimensional characters who are purely there to inform and create the piece, we have very gentlemanly mannerisms such as holding one hand behind your back and speaking quite fast but still very clear. Compared to the times when we create attachments with the audience by becoming more three dimensional characters who have less general characteristics such as playing with hair and reacting to what people say instead of waiting for their turn to speak, this is when we attempt to make the audience feel sympathetic towards the characters by creating moments of intense human emotion.
Hollie Walker
Berkoff Process
We went about shaping our piece by sitting down and discussing something we wanted to mainly focus on, which we decided was to be the woman and her relationship with the husband. After we had decided this we went on to devise choreographed pieces for the extracts of script we had chosen and then linked the "scenettes" with movement. In order for us to remember the most about our piece we always went over what we had done in the previous rehearsal just to remind ourselves of what we had done and this also made it a lot easier to learn lines and also made sure no material was forgotten. We came across a lot of problems with our piece for example travelling was always an issue so we found that we spent much of the time devising ways to move effectively across the space and we also focused a lot on the mannerisms of different characters, for example switching between the woman and the narrators was difficult and so we had to sort out defined characters.
As we mainly used classrooms for our rehearsal space we made sure all of the tables and chairs were put as far away as possible allowing us the maximum performance space and to avoid failing over or into them. We tied our hair back when performing and took any loose jewellery off to save it from getting caught. Whenever we are weight bearing we tried to spread the weight equally and when Clelia is leaning back for example we hold onto each others in order for us to have the most grip.
From doing this piece of work I think I have learnt to hold certain moments in order to create emotion as I found that our piece was all being too rushed but when certain poignant moments are picked out and slowed down it evokes more feeling from the characters which comes across a lot easier to the audience. I also learnt that in order to make our piece more in the style of Berkoff we need to have reason and direction for every movement and especially for travelling, this was difficult for us as the layout of our chairs was spread so far apart that we did a lot of travelling, in order to tackle this problem we just used the chairs less and only came back to them at moments where they were being used for standing on or in another way than sitting. Overall I think that my performance has evolved whilst devising this piece as it is a very serious piece which involves lots of human emotion which I have had to adapt to by changing the tone of my voice and my gestures.
