Communication of the humanist message

In the end of our performance we all stood up and scattered around the space delivering a eulogy/obituary or summary of our life as if we'd just died. This along with the depressing melody and the effect of all of as reciting our eulogies at once created a pathos for the audience.

I decided to write a poem as if I'd just committed suicide and was reading one at my own funeral.

She was a girl with no roots to the ground,

In a gawky bubble she drifted around,

She was a dreamer, an occasional screamer,

Though she screamed in a way that no one could hear her.

She saw no purpose in this world of mundanity,

Living faintly in her misshapen reality.

She breathed through adventure,

and thrills of high moments,

But her empty lungs conjured up torments.

She knew exactly where she should've been born,

The bright orange jacket she should've worn,

The warrior pact by which she should've sworn,

The villain flesh she should've torn.

But all she could be was a roeless thorn.

Which is why today it is her that we mourn.

This was followed by the ending where we brought flowers and items with sentimental value to the table and named their prices to end on  "love costs nothing"

I think that we were successful in some ways in delivering a humanist message from our use of Brechtian exaggeration and satirical skits of heavy topics. Our goal was to communicate this message to the audience which I think we did as our play enforced an marketed socialism in the slaps of our Dragon's Den and Britain's got Talent remakes because of the victims we strongly identified. Our use of the chorus of capitalist snobs turning into filthy public school kids or groups of women throwing money around was really effective. Adding these touches of a musical  reminded the audience they were watching a play like spontaneous singing in mundane situations does and drew more attention to the message rather than the naturalism of the scenes. Although these chorus parts could have been made more efficient and slick if they were rehearsed the same way at least in the end of the rehearsal process because some of it got lost. The game show was supposed to be a direct and simple dig at the audience to get the message by placing them as plebs and  bosses which was a very clear and challenging idea in theory. But as we didn't have extensive seating it might have not been as effective. 

Austerity the game show

Our theme and centre of our show is going to be Austerity in the UK. Government cuts or tax increase as part of policies made to reduce budget deficits. These policies come with a price: The increase in un-employment, creating more debts in the country, reducing spending because of the money in household pockets starts to reduce etc… 

Due to this there have been many Protest marches and demands against Austerity in the UK. But our protest against it will be a Brechtian style performance to challenge the audience into facing the existing and potential problems in our society. With a comedic approach of a monopoly-like game show we are going to tickle our audience and then hit them with the disturbing reality. 
As the audience came in we rolled a dice symbolic of luck in the capitalist world and gave them seats based on their titles as Plebs or Bosses. This was a dark but comedic angle to start off with and made it a perfect tickle for us to then reveal darker and darker realities in the different episodes. Then as the game show came back on the Pleb life got increasingly harsh with the dismal fortune cards and tragic jail sentences. I think we were quite successful in slowly bringing across the idea of exploitation and letting the audience realize for themselves when to stop laughing.
The game show in my opinion brought the episodes together quite well. The transitions between scenes could've been improved but the constant themes of consumption, exploitation and need for socialism were very prominent throughout. Not just with the ongoing game show but with the very similar chorus we had in a lot of scenes which reinforced the V-effect and kept the messages strong. The luxury items being held out by slave shelf humans in the price, the ridiculous parade of walking advertisements that came through our focus group and the indulge market research discussion, the mass of demonized public school kids contrasted with the rich white men peering and laughing scathingly at socialism...

Focus group

A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging.
Focus groups are a company's ways of researching their market by setting up a meeting with their target audience. In most cases it's just a few people of their target audience with what we think are biased views of the product. This is part of their advertising much more than it is research because they can then legally come out with percentages and fractions of  "researched" data. For example there can be six women in a focus group and literally five out of the six can give positive feedback which would enable the company to say that 84% of women say the product has done wonders for them.

Would you rather

We came up with a way to show how biased focus groups are by creating a  commercial "would you rather" scam. Our handpicked characters would agree with the products and show immense enthusiasm and overestimation. We were also thinking about using placards for the "consumers" to humanize them and highlight their purposes on being in the focus group.

First of all we established some stereotypes that would be reacting to the comparisons different ways.
We have One overly sexual and thick female character who passes up no opportunity to jump up and down in excitement and let out unnecessary noises or touch everything like it's a naked baby.
On the front we'd state the obvious about her nature and on the                                                              back placard it would say                                                                                                                            
The second woman would a "female Joey Essex" and would ask questions like "OMG you actually got a caveman?!" and "what do you mean animal testing? cats don't need samples of anti-wrinkle cream..." On her front it wold say "Joey Essex dumb" and on the back placard "Lonely" This girl is the salesman's tool; she'll believe anything. The oh so sexy one however will be walk out of the group a walking ad creating a consumer ripple effect.

We were also debating weather to have a "Eco-warrior" or a "fame-whore". Possibly a nerdy girl; a sci-fi freak, part of a big green hippie club.giving but so, so annoying with a dorky habit of correcting everyone. She'll also have a sadder reality on her back, maybe "never want to be seen as a failure". By developing these characters more we could establish the V effect in our performance. The placards would explain the character's inner and outer self and would create more of a fascination with our message. Along with the three stereotypes and the "cocky salesman" we'd have someone a little or a lot smarter; "a snob".
The one out of the hypothetical six consumers that had a negative feedback to a product. On her inner/back placard it would say "insecure".

She would have a lot to say but would be stopped by the smug salesman and humiliated. The slap in this case being  the consumer manipulation present in out society and how businesses view the actual people in their precious target audiences.
We started by coming up with our offensive and comedic would you rather.
Our products could be generic like miraculous boob jobs, Botox heaven in a bottle, Brazilian goddess wax etc... Mark the sales guy would advertise them by contrasting Katie Price boobs with anorexic chests, Brilliant Brazilian with caveman wax, Joan river's face (that probably still feels like a baby's bottom six feet under) with a 90 year old prune failing to be a cougar. My favorite one was for the fake tan that Daisy came up with;
would you rather look like an Irish albino or have Umpa-Lumpa-luscious complexion? 
The clever snob would try to contradict these questions saying she doesn't want to feel like a nine year old down there or that the cream has ghastly ingredients that are written so small people overlook them. She will of-course be hushed by Mark breaking the fourth wall. We thought that every time that someone says anything negative about the product, Vlad pauses the scene and changes their words around to make them like the project and if they still refuse to like it he then twists their words even more so and poses them to be negative people.

the caveman wax and old phone

For fulfilling the V-effect in our Brechtian focus group we also used props. The two "bimbos" would be wearing uncomfortably high stilettos and the "snobby bitch" would have on glasses as character definitions. We sourced Mark the jackass a symbolic gold phone. The key to the would you rather idea was having epic live representations. So we got Michael with balloons under his shirt and Becky with a wig under her bikini to bring to life the boob-job do and and wax-job don't. I found some blue face-paint from my corpse bride costume and we decided to use that as a capitalist anti-wrinkle cream that would then start to itch and burn. We would then wipe our humiliation away with money tissues Mark threw at us as yet another exaggerated semiotic.
We began improvising with a rough script of our ideas which we added on to in the rehearsal process.