Political Protest Evaluation

As part of the unit this term in political theatre we where assigned to create a political protest. In the case of our protest, this included the theme of immigration. Being an issue that is constantly on rotation in the media and being commented on by politicians, we thought it was a rather relative subject and being such a broad topic it offered us with many opportunity for theatrical input.    

 From the start we found it quite difficult to settle on one idea. This is either because we would find ourselves being indecisive or we would pick an idea that we would eventually decide we didn't like. An aspect that we found hard to get our heads round was working out the difference between a political issue and a social one. We found that there was a very fine boarder between the two and being a protest, it was very important that the message we where relaying was obvious to the audience. However this meant that when we finally settled on a idea, we had left ourselves with very little time in order to pull it off.

Due to this lack of time, we new our protest would have to remain simplistic but at the same time be effective in getting our concept to the audience. So as a result we came up with the idea of creating a barrier within the school representative of the UK a boarder. We placed this outside the entrance of the small canteen, where here we would pose as border control officers and as people attempted to pass by we would stop and interrogate them, some what simulating the experience of someone trying to enter the country.The majority of on goers took well to this, with a good understanding of what we where doing. Although on the other hand we found too often people would try bombard us, choosing to not cooperate and ignore our simple instructions. This was irritating at some points, but we understood this was during some of the students break and we didn't want to overly interfere with this. So considering those factors I was rather pleased with our audiences reaction, with many seeing a funnier side to it and some even coming back for more.

As far as a political protest goes, I feel we managed to represent a very small part of a very large scale topic. I think if we had put more time and effort into the research of this issue, we would have been more educated ourselves on the facts and statistics behind it and been better capable of enlightening our audience on subject. On the performance side things, I believe we created a very appealing and inviting demonstration for anyone who wished to get involved.

In conclusion, although there where aspects that could have easily been improved on, I was very happy with how it turned out and how it was received. I feel I have learnt many new things about the issue of immigration and the process of creating and performing a protest