Blog Post 1: Brainstorm and Planning of the Global context and SOI

We had spent one lesson planning and brainstorming our project against the SOI and the global context for our unit.

For this unit, our SOI was that “Artists raise awareness of the implications of change and innovation through their work”. Our project this unit was to learn about Bertolt Brecht’s theatre through acting a scene of his play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”. We had made multiple links of between our unit’s SOI with Brecht’s work that we have studied. Firstly, Brecht’s work was based on the context of World War II, where change was happening to everything that surrounded Brecht at that time. His work was highly influenced by these changes. The play that we have studied, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”, was a play that critiques Hitler’s action when he rose to power. Hitler’s power changed the society, innovated different communication techniques that had influenced the society very much. The change and innovation were the factors that urged the innovation of Brecht’s work. Additionally, Brecht had innovated techniques and used it in his work to achieve the purpose and intentions of his plays. He had implicated his innovations to cause change in the surrounding society that also has experienced ongoing change. The purpose and intentions of his plays were obvious to the audience, and his techniques helped to clarify and enforce it. These were the links that we had come up with during the workshop of brainstorming the links between the studies in our unit with the SOI.

For the Global Context of the unit, it is “Scientific and Technical Innovation”. For this unit, Brecht’s work had shown to be very relatable to the global context. Firstly, the context of Brecht’s work had been WWII, which was a time where Hitler had innovated and improved the technical areas of expertise to the benefit of the war and the German people. The global context surrounds innovations that are in the benefit of others. Secondly, Brecht’s work has been innovated to help achieve a purpose. This purpose was to educate and help the audience understand the world through theatre. Again, this highlights the importance of the global context in the project. Brecht’s work uses techniques and science to a certain extent to reach a purpose, which reminds people of the importance of innovation in theatre. These links shows the importance and how the global context is highlighted within the project.

In our project, we will be using Epic Theatre techniques to continue Brecht’s purpose of helping the audience understand the world through theatre. These techniques are very crucial to the effect of the theatre since it highlights and urges thinking processes in the audience. Therefore, although we don’t cause huge changes in the society while performing the scene to the audience. We still intend to change the thoughts of the audience about the society through theatre, like what the SOI and the global context have stated. The workshop this time had helped all of us become more clear about our intentions in the unit, and understand the purpose of our SOI and the global context of our unit better.