Protest Evaluation

Today we performed our political protests that we have been working on outside of the lessons. Our political protest was about political correctness and has it gone too far? I felt overall that our protests went well and that our message got across to the audience well and that we also incorporated a theatre element to our piece in a good, creative way. However there are defiantly different aspects of our protests that I would change if I was to do it again. In our protest we had three people being prisoners and to people be guards and they were acting as the government and taking away our freedom of speech as we were being limited in what we were able to say, by them covering our mouths and like a declaration reading out what the proper things to say.

 

One of the things that I think was really successful and came across to the audience really well was the usage of the marks. On our marks we had written impoliticly correct and politically correct things on them. This showed the audience clearly, in a more artistic way, the message that we were trying to get across. It also showed how people can get lost behind the rules and that the government can take things so far that we can become encompassed by it. I also think that visually this was really good because it made a statement that is stronger because it highlights the importance of the words and that phrases that have become peoples lives and the impact of the words on people. Whether the words are racist and have a negative impact in that way or whether the words are just ridicules like having to say “baa baa rainbow sheep”.
 

Another thing I think that we did well was the way we showed how some aspects of political correctness have gone too far. We did this in the way that we had the three people in mask’s singing “baa baa black sheep” then having the “government” taking away their freedom of speech, by forcing their mouths shut. This showed the way that small things that hardly relate to anything, the government are changing and to the public can seem stupid. In the protest we showed how pathetically laughable this can become, when we started singing “baa baa rainbow sheep.” Also we had the two people representing the government read out certain things that you can’t say anymore, such as calling you pet and “pet” because it is derogatory. They were reading the out like a declaration; this added humour because they were so serious about what are seemingly stupid things.

 

Also we used the Brechtian style of acting, when we used people to represent the government as a whole and the actions that they were doing, instead of just one person in the government. As it shows the overall effect and that we are not just protesting against one person but at the whole issue. Also the people with masks were showing the effect it had on all of society, this was good because it showed the large scale that the issue effects.

 

However if we were to do our protest again, there are defiantly some aspects that I would change, to improve our performance. Firstly, and probably the most important part not only of what I would change but of the protest as a whole, is the subject matter that we chose to protest about. It is a subject that all of us knew and it’s something that a lot of people talk about and think has gotten a bit out of hand, however it is such a broad subject that we found it hard to find one part of it to focus on. We found that we were a bit unsure where to start and it wasn’t overly easy to turn into a piece of theatre, because it is more of a discussion topic that is quite casual, compare to more serious issues that can be acted out. Also a lot of us understand the issue but it isn’t something that all of us have a real passion for. As we were in a group not everyone in the group is to have something that we feel really strongly about, so we went for something that we all understood because it seemed fairer that way. However if we found something that we felt more passionately about, we might have been more excited and motivated to push ourselves to create more of an interesting performance.

Also I think that we spent a lot of time looking into the research of the issue of political correctness, the different views of it, the news paper articles and all the things that it incorporated. Consequently we knew a lot about our issue and we have a lot of information to work with, however it turned out that we had spent more time on the research than we had on the actual performance and devising process. This meant that we have less time to rehearse and to explore the different things we could do in our performance, which could have weakened our protest as a whole. Also with the amount of information that we had, we were slightly hindered because it we had so much knowledge that we didn’t really know where to start or what to focus on. This made it difficult to highlight the most important thing and to make a really powerful performance, as there was so much that we could choose from and we didn’t really know what we should use and what we shouldn’t.