Political protest evaluation/what went well/what could have been better

our topic: misrepresentation of minority's in the media.

my group for  our protest was sybil, adjei, Daniel, tatenda and myself. When first given the task we had lots of contrasting ideas including police brutality, the tampon tax and the one we finally settled on, misrepresentation of minorities in the media. We chose this topic as it was very topical and controversial and would make people think. We chose several different groups to focus on, white females, black males, Muslim/ Asian ect. Some of our choices we especially topical for the time we did the protest down to the Paris attacks.

We chose to stage our protest in the foyer; this was because we knew it would be a busy area at break time so we would come into contact with the most people. Whilst this was effective it was also difficult because there were lots of different groups in the same area so people were distracted by all the chaos. If we were to do it again i would say we could have done it somewhere not quite as busy such as the small canteen to make more of an impact.

We created posters with facts on them so people could also understand the concept and become more well informed rather then the piece becoming a interactive performance. I felt that this worked well and we could have gone further with this and found more statistics and facts and been shouting them out to people passing who weren’t reading the signs.

For our protest we created the ‘brit school documentary’ where we pulled people aside and interview them asking stereotypical questions for their gender or race and if they didn’t give the correct answers we would scold them and make them look stupid. We also took inspiration from the piece of theatre we saw ‘ labels’ and used labels to label people to their stereo types. This was effective as if offended people so they asked questions and thought about the topic more carefully.

We each took on a different role , Daniel was the plant so if the people we pulled to the side to ‘interview’ for the brit school documentary weren’t understanding the concept we could pull Daniel in and he could play along well and portray the message. Sybil was the makeup artist, she was writing labels for people and ‘white washing’ black people for the camera and also giving them beards and wigs ect to create their stereo types. Tatenda was the interviewer asking the question. I was the camera women and would ask them to act more of a certain stereo type. Adjei also did a similar thing as the sound man asking them to change their voices to sound more like there stereo type.

To improve upon our protest i would say put more research in and make sure the people read and understood what we were protesting before they left.