POLITICAL PROTESTS

Final Evaluation

In today's lunch break we performed our political protest on Aleppo's chemical warfare. Despite the wind and damp ground, everything seemed to go better than originally had hoped.

Originally we arranged to peg up some information to our wire line which stretched 20 meters over the basketball court. Unfortunately this idea had to be quickly scrapped as upon pinning the
information up, the pegs were not sufficiently strong enough to hold the sheets up in the strong winds. This left us on plan B. We had to say the information we had originally shown on paper. We decided to announce "chemical warfare!" at the start of each rotation of our piece. Also when people walked by we would say facts and warn them about the gas attacks. Overall, our set and props were effected quite drastically to what we had originally planned due to weather conditions, but we still managed to overcome this issue by adding verbally to our performance piece.

Protest group in costume

I think that our piece was very strong. I believe we managed to convey the effects of chemical attacks clearly to our audience, managing to capture the viewers attention long enough to get the full effects of our devised work. We had our worries that the audience would be left confused but thankfully they understood what we were doing. I even heard people starting conversations about what chemical warfare is, which is the hope of a protest; to start a debate and ask questions. I feel that our physical movements were fluid and transitioned seamlessly into our audience interaction sequence. In rehearsal we thought that it would look sloppy. Instead, we settled on using my whistle as a single to get back into our starting positions and begin our next scene rotation. This was effective as it allowed the audience to see two sides of our piece, and let them know that the next mini performance was about to start - making them want to stay and watch.

Another thing I felt was successful was our audience interaction. This was effective as we weren't too close to them that they began to feel like they were about to be scared, but close enough to feel safe enough to interact with us - which is just what they did. We taught people when and how to put on the face mask which was poignant as they seemed genuinely interested and also seemed to be very engrossed by how we were saying that the face masks can save a life.  We also managed to break the fourth wall effortlessly and in a way that didn't feel forced.

As for our performance, I felt that we were strong. Despite missing two members of our group, we managed to fill in their spots without the audience feeling like something was missing. My body movements were clear yet subtle, allowing a clear moment for the character. I found it challenging to continuously die... over... and over again, as after a while I started to slack a bit in the effort of my performance as I became exhausted from being flung around around. I did snap my self out of this though and tried to give my all into the rest of my scene. I also felt that I maintained my physicality throughout. It was hard to keep nimble and fluid as the cold started to make my muscles tense, however I combated this by ignoring the cold. A positive of using a large area was that we were able to utilise all of the space for our protest. This gave the sense of scale to the issue.

I felt that we could improve our vocal work. When interacting with the audience we were less vocally able, once again due to the cold.  We didn't have the articulation and diction nor the projection to carry our voices to audiences which at the other end of our site. I also felt we could've improved our focus as we slightly lost character when our friends tried to put us off. This was challenging as you could hear them laughing, but you had to totally block them out.

Overall, I felt our political protest was successful, sparking interesting conversations about the real loss of war and the use of harmful chemicals to kill innocent civilians.