Political Protests Evaluation

https://twitter.com/BRITTheatre/status/801020052296216576

I thought our political protest was extremely effective and had a significant impact on those who participated in or saw the protest. The fact that our protest was mainly audience participation meant that already it was going to have a direct effect on those people as they were in the midst of the action. The game of grandmothers footsteps immediately drew the audience in and thereby effected them emotional. In the protest I found that different people had very different responses to playing the game; some were very enthusiastic and eager to reach grandmother, others were more nervous and anxious as to what might happen, and a small percentage just refused to play at all. Either why by directly asking them if they wanted to play it forced them to have an emotional response and engage with the possibility of playing grandmothers footsteps with these paint covered people who have 'patients' written on their faces. By having an emotional engagement right from the start, it means that the effect of the restraining will be furthered because your playing with their current emotional response and conceptions as to what the protest is about.

However, the game of grandmothers footsteps came with both pros and cons. Aside from the fact it was a great layer to our protest, it caused problems with the controlling of the audience and getting them to go where you want to. Each time we played grandmothers footsteps there was always one person who ran forward at an immense speed at an attempt to win they game. Although this was great as it meant they were getting into it, it caused a serious problem for us as our protest can only happen via the three patients getting to grandmothers first. This couldn't happen if someone else got there first. We also needed a certain amount of space around the doctors so they would be able to put us down into a restraint, this became repeatedly difficult when audience members got to close to the three doctors. As a group we had actually thought about the issue of accidentally restraining a random person or them getting in the way of our performance and we had devised what we thought was a suitable method of preventing this. This, however, proved to be useless and brought the quality of the protest down. The plan was that we would draw an end line just behind the doctors and tell the audience to 'wait there', we would then precede to move towards the doctors and get restrained. The first problem we encountered was that we were too quick in moving towards the doctors, this meant that we had got too far by the time we were supposed to tell them to wait and therefore we couldn't do it in the time frame. It also disrupted the flow of the game and meant that the audience was now aware that something was going to happening, resulting in the restraining having less of an impact. As the protest went on we started to work out a system where those who got to far forward would be 'out' and have to go back to the start, even if they weren't technically out. This system was a lot more efficient and enabled us to regain control over our audiences, however it only came into our piece half way through. Therefore we should have tested out our original method so we had control over the audience right from the start of the protest.


The painting of the inappropriate restraints tally chart was also something that I thought was extremely successful. It was effective for two reasons. Firstly, it outlined what our protest was about and the take we had on it. After each restraint the doctors would go over to dip their hands into the bucket of black paint, using this to draw a line on the tally chart. It made it clear that it was about restraint and that that was what the doctors were doing, as it would be very easy to misinterpret our physicalization of the face-down restraint. It also showed that as a collect we felt that the use of this was unnecessary and it was not the promotion of any of these practices, this was outlined by the word 'inappropriate'. The second way it was effective was in a visual sense. The image of these three people in white lab coats, dipping their hands into this black paint only to use it to smudge another count onto the tally chart, I feel was very powerful. The contrast that came between the white of the lab coats and the black of the paint was strong and eye-catching. The paint was seemingly representational of how messy and blurred the practice of face-down restraint can be, as it is also a contrast to the environment off a medical building where everything is pristine, sterilized, orderly and neat (unlike the scrawling of the tally chart). Therefore demonstrating how face-down restraint goes against what a hospital should be like.