Political Protest Evaluation

On the 25th of November myself and the rest of my political protest group including Joshua Baxter, Joshua Katembela and Kim Mccuaig, decided that we would perform a protest about the sexualisation of men and women.

As actors we were representing men in the media with the term that all men should be muscular, tanned and 'fit'. We had a actor performing as Sex slave which was Josh and two actors being described as "just an object" which was played by me and Kimberly playing the role of  ‘Owner’ in which she had control over all three actors and their bodies. Kimberly was the only female in the group and the idea of the performance was that Kim owned a company that had ownership over men like how in some countries men have ownership over women and use women as sex slaves and sell them also known as Sex Trafficking. The performance also included foul imagery and abuse.

I played the role of a man around 18-20 and who was owned by a woman and was just one of the many men that she owned but i was just a object, people such as the audience could do anything they'd like to me which included sticking, drawing and writing things over my body and they could have bought me if they pleased. The level of professional execution was high, I believe we did it in a gentle yet shocking manner. Provoking lots of different emotions in the audience/spectators we conducted ourselves professionally and made sure we got our point across.

I think our piece made an impact on the audience because it wasn’t the women that were out in that situation as we see every day, by making it a male based piece made it even more shocking because people are not familiar with seeing this on a regular basis. For example when we were performing one of the audience members said to one of the actors that “she felt sick and sad for the boys” and she was asking if the boys were okay, another person said that they were “honestly shocked and had never put themselves in a situation of empathy for woman in porn".

The weaknesses of the piece was that it was a little unorganised but that was partly due to the environment we chose for our piece, also we were restricted by the law meaning we couldn’t show pornographic images so on our behalf we should have been more prepared and less reliant on media to create a point and expressed the point we wanted to ourselves.

The strengths I felt were that we had a strong group dynamic and that came across in the piece we really felt strongly about the issue and wanted to do something that could really open people’s eyes about the issue and make people empathy’s with the situations that we were portraying I felt it was also very successful because at the moment in society I feel as woman understand more how it feels to be in that position and then replacing it with men then meant men felt what woman feel and this made the piece relatable to both sexes which was very successful. Overall I felt it was a successful message we were informing people about but also as a piece of theatre or performance art it also applies and is successful.