Day: 7 February 2016

There have been many adaptations on the Christmas Carol as it was a huge hit, it also changed many people’s lives as miser’s became guilty and decided to give more to charity furthermore charity incomes increased hugely since the book was released by Charles Dickens in 1843. This indicates that the book as well as being fantastic it was also a learning curve for many people and changed many people’s lives, no wonder it is still amongst us till this day.

If I were to create a modern day Christmas Carol it would be based in Chicago. I would pick Chicago as it has a very rich side full of skyscrapers and the outskirts is full of poor people which no one knows about. When a tourist thinks of Chicago they see the beautiful skyscrapers such as the Willis tower, and they instantly think its a very stable place with no poor people in sight. However when you reach the outskirts of Chicago such as South Side, is not known and ignored by everyone who’s powerful or rich in the stable part of Chicago. This side of Chicago is poor and has destroyed homes with no windows and some with no doors as well where children and single mothers are living, with this being the case gangs are starting to take over this part with a lot of violence taking place. Kids go hungry in this part of Chicago and being near shoots outs and gangs everyday influences them and gives them no choice but in being in a gang as they are not given the opportunity which other kids get.

The actor I would choose is Mark Wahlberg as he is a very famous actor and is also very entertaining, however in his early years he was arrested for many things and was also was part of a gang this represents in the book the part where Scrooge had a troubled childhood as well as Mark did so I feel like they would relate well and he would defiantly do a great job.

I read Liccle Bit which was written by Alex Wheatle, I believe this book to be an inspiration for the youths of today. It also shows an average life of a young teenager being brought up on a estate and the pressure of being in a gang and of fitting it also shows a side that if you do eventually get caught up in a gang their is consequences, that are death or ending up in prison.

The story is about a young teenager called Lemar his nickname is ‘Liccle Bit’ as he is the second shortest guy in his year group. Lemar falls in love with the hottest girl in the year but his two best friends never tire of telling him he has no chance with Venetia or any other girl. Things aren’t much better at home, his mum is permanently hassled, his sister a frustrated young single mother and a dad who moved out years ago. Lemar dreams of having an easy life and money to make his life better and to have better clothes and shoes or maybe even a new phone.

However with the urge of making money he leads himself into a troubled life, when Venetia starts paying Lemar attention, he hopes this is the chance to get with Venetia. However a new gang war has started with young people being killed every week in the area and Lemar finds himself doing something sinister which is not him. One of the gangs in the area takes an interest to Lemar, asks him to do jobs and in return will give him money, but when he hears about the killings on the estate, Lemar is forced to question himself and was it his fault?

Liccle Bit was a very good book as I could relate to the character in the book, as I live in an estate and have the pressure of being in a gang. It also taught me that being in a gang can cause depression as you may have done something you didn’t want to do. However at the beginning of the Liccle Bit I found it quite hard to engage with the book as I found it boring and not interesting but as I got to the 4th chapter things began to kick off, I would recommend this book to anyone as it is a good book and you could learn something from it.

The techniques for the distancing effect that he done was achieved by the way that the actor or performer would not seem to act as their was an audience or a wall surrounding them

The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place” (Willett 91). The use of direct audience-address is one way of disrupting stage illusion and generating the distancing effect. In performance, as the performer “observes himself”, his objective is “to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work. Whether Brecht intended the distancing effect to refer to the audience or to the actor or to both audience and actor is still controversial among teachers and scholars of “Epic Acting” and Brechtian theatre.

By disclosing and making obvious the manipulative contrivances and “fictive” qualities of the medium, the actors alienate the viewer from any passive acceptance and enjoyment of the play as mere “entertainment”. Instead, the viewer is forced into a critical, analytical frame of mind that serves to disabuse him or her of the notion that what he is watching is necessarily an inviolable, self-contained narrative. This effect of making the familiar strange serves a didactic function insofar as it teaches the viewer not to take the style and content for granted, since the medium itself is highly constructed and contingent upon many cultural and economic conditions.

It may be noted that Brecht’s use of distancing effects in order to prevent audience members from bathing themselves in empathetic emotions and to draw them into an attitude of critical judgment may lead to other reactions than intellectual coolness. Brecht’s popularization of the V-Effekt has come to dominate our understanding of its dynamics. But the particulars of a spectator’s psyche and of the tension aroused by a specific alienating device may actually increase emotional impact.^[8] Audience reactions are rarely uniform, and there are many diverse, sometimes unpredictable, responses that may be achieved through distancing.

Actors, directors, and playwrights may draw on alienating effects in creating a production. The playwright may describe them in the script’s stage directions, in effect requiring them in the staging of the work. A director may take a script that has not been written to alienate and introduce certain techniques, such as playing dialogue forward to remind the audience that there is no fourth wall, or guiding the cast to act “in quotation marks”. The actor (usually with the director’s permission) may play scenes with an ironic subtext. These techniques and many more are available for artists in different aspects of the show. For the playwright, reference to vaudeville or musical revues, will often allow rapid segues from empathy to a judgmental attitude through comic distancing. A very effective use of such estrangement in an English language script can be found in Brendan Behan‘s The Hostage.