The Tango Ballad belongs to The Threepenny Opera written by Brecht and composed by Weill in reaction to traditional opera and being part of the Dadaism movement which was challenging academia and what was considered the good values, delivering chaos, breaking boundaries and criticising capitalism.

 

Macheath and Jenny were this unhappy couple surviving on Jenny’s prostitution, causing her disgust towards Macheath, who is revealing his violence on her when she can’t make any customers. Jenny starts doubting her love for that lazy gangster, who thinks that he has the right to be mad and do absolutely nothing while his poor wife sells her body.

 

This unhealthy relationship comes to an end in this act, while they leave their house, and we are left with the fear of what’s going to happen to Jenny, since Macheath mentions, in his gangster way, ‘It looks like soon I’ll be taking care of her’.

 

My character for this duet was Macheath and Princess was my partner as Jenny. In this act, Macheath was the dominant character and the piece was all about his negative impact on his wife’s life and my initial thought was about a dominance throw positivity towards Princess, as I noticed she was a very introverted member of our class. I naturally choose her to get to know her better and give her the chance of feeling safer and maybe having someone to be more open with and get inspired by.

 

While we rehearsed I talked with her very straightly and honestly and I never meant to make her feel worse or better than me, but remind her she’s just different and that’s why I wanted to get close to her and understand her if she gave me the chance. It was also a personal challenge to my patience and my ability to listen to someone with a totally opposite personality, a different point of view, and very low self-esteem.

 

With no doubt that one of the weakest points we had in our performance was that we didn’t practice enough so we could make more actioning decisions. Personally, I found my performance quite desperate, since I moved too much with lack of control, while I got distracted by helping my partner with her lines.

 

Although I didn’t explore it as deeply as I would like to, the tool of Actioning was very helpful, since with it, we can associate each line with an intention, making us more connected with our own emotions and language, making us feel more what we say, and resulting in a more truthful and alive acting.

 

I enjoyed the contact with Speak-singing technique not only because of its inclusiveness but mainly by giving us the possibility of more dynamic performance, switching it with singing.

 

The duet in the class that really stuck in my mind was Astelle and Gaston because they both face difficulties about singing, and through the two techniques I just mentioned above, good preparation and dedication, they built a lovely piece while being very true to themselves and delivering us real emotion.