Political Protest

   

In this day and age we have many social and political issues and just as many different ways of enforcing and challenging them. What is a protest if not a necessity to have your voice heard created by the severity of a social or political situation. Protest is marches, boycotts, illegal action, strikes riots and speeches but it can also be art. It can be a straight forward argument presented in theatrical way. The effect of that is the ability to bring an audience on something that seems to be an escape but is really Encapsulating the chaos and damage of political actions into art. It can be even more effective than a "real" protest. Something that has a completely different and appealing platform of provoking change. Takckling social issues and raising awareness over them in a narrative art form. I belive that every piece of good art is if not central to, influenced by a political angle or social issue. Perhaps because the best art comes out of pain and oppression. We, as a group and as individuals thought about the issues in the world that we feel strongly about. There were hot topics like the flaws of capitalism, the refugee crisis, discrimination, human trafficking, unequal healthcare and education etc...

As children of free speech and a powerful tool like Brechtian Theatre we are presented with countless possibilities to protest. The list of facts to challenge are also endless. Political theatre is a reflection of society and can be made into a very clear challenge towards a certain aspect of it. A Brechtian style is what would take a reflective piece of theatre and make it not only hold up a mirror to society but a hammer with which to shape it. Political theatre is Political Theatre, is Theatre that moves away from your normal story telling. I believe that Political Theatre is there to spark others, and their ideas. It should leave the audience leaving motivated, but they should be questioning themselves and the society they live in.

It addresses several issues, not just politics and the Government. We live in a society where Homophobia, Discrimination and Prejudice are common occurrences. Through Theatre, we can confront those issues and make the audience think about it. We can also confront the Government, and the current affairs we see on the news everyday.

 It gives us a chance as Actors, Directors and even Writers to talk about the issues we face everyday, and not be stopped for it. 

our PROTEST

Our protest was based on human value and idealism in the materialistic world of possibly privatised healthcare and money orientated adoption agencies. We tried to commit to being salespeople of a nicely packaged brand at a sample baby stall to question just how real the caricature we painted had the potential to become. We had our own brand catalogue and were pricing babies based on their ethnicity and gender.We put the most price on a male Aryan baby to challenge idealism and presented our capitalist company with variations of an ironic motto and logo, deciding on Stork and Co. "child trafficking the right way". We wanted to give the logo a warm family feel to make our point about the "human" yet inhumane companies who brainwash us daily. 

I initially pictured bugs bunny's hand grabbing a bitten carrot. The masked hand would suggest a dark manipulated side to the multi-millionaire kid's cartoon character's arm enjoying a healthy snack. And the bitten vegetable gave us the idea to write "get the app" below our logo. Finally we decided to go with a simple blue stork as a fantastical romanticized version of the truth behind these tedious adoptions.

Our roles in the protest were to be the over-friendly robotic people the Stall itself and take orders, answer questions, explain the company and ADVERTISE!  We were smiling up to our ears with banners posters and conversational proposals, really calm and friendly to contradict the callous reality of what we were actually doing. 

Before the protest we researched this topic finding out how much adoption really costs and we were shocked to find prices of $36000, most of it going for profit and advertising. We were looking at a reality in which adoption agencies become as commercialized as the food industry. We’d all walked past a “Hello fresh” type food delivery company stall and tried to incorporate some of their selling techniques to make our point on media manipulation. Our other political motive was to challenge the price of humans with disabilities or poor backgrounds. In our Baby Spring Catalog We had offers like free delivery coupons and three to five working days per child, as well as a romanticized version of the truth in our logo.

As a criticism of the success level of our protest I’d say there were a few things I’d do differently. First of all there were two other groups in a space near us and it seemed like our protest clashed a bit but we were still successful in bringing people over and getting desired reactions out of them. Lots of them questioned our pricing of the babies which was what we wanted but not as many noticed the point we were trying to make with the commercialization of our company. I feel like we could have gone even further with Stork and Co. and made an even bigger Brechtian style commercial of a protest. It was more like a naturalistic improvisation and was a bit far-fetched for all the people to fully understand. We all agreed on the potential for protest to be a theatrical product because all good theatre is political and a way to make a change in society is not only to threaten and demand for it.