Political Protest Evaluation

The research me and my group did on the subject of victim blaming was extremely interesting. I wasn’t fully aware on some of the opinions of others when it came to circumstances of women being raped. Some of the opinions were truly shocking as they blamed women for being raped in the first place. Which put a whole new look on how I felt as a women. This made me feel so much anger towards the people who thought that it was women’s fault when victimized. I turned this anger to passion and used that energy to give a good, believable performance.
My role in the protest was a drunken girl who was wearing revealing clothing. The most popular excuse for rape is “she was too drunk to tell me she didn’t want it” and “she was dressed provocatively so she obviously wanted it” I also had to shout out quotes we had found from our research and I feel this was very effective because it showed the contrast. For most of the performance I was staggering about drunkenly and shouting out the quotes, there were moments were we would all come out of character and repeated the phrase “women are not guilty for the violence committed by men in their body mind and spirit” this took all the acting out for a few seconds and just made people aware that when people are raped it effects them physically mentally and spiritually.
I felt that our performance really got people to listen and question their view on victimizing rape victims. I overheard a conversation being had by onlookers saying they do jump to conclusion when seeing women wearing revealing clothing they automatically assume they are going to get themselves into trouble and they are asking for it. There were a lot of people looking and having their own opinions, one person actually wanted to have a debate on the subject with me, I had to choose between staying in character and getting the message through in performance or breaking character and informing him in more detail in the subject. I decided it would affect the performance and make it look shabby if I suddenly broke character unsynchronized with the other members so I stayed in character but the person found someone else to debate with.
I think we executed our ideas very professionally; we were organized in our preparation and rehearsal. And we considered the audience and all the health and safety hazards that could be in our performance. We were in quite a risky place to perform, on the stairs. We had to be extremely careful when walking up and down and take the audience into consideration by not interfering with their journey too much.
One of the weaknesses I think we had in our performance was that the music was a big part of our performance but it wasn’t quite loud enough. The song was a very popular song that was extremely controversial because it suggested sexual assault as an okay thing. With lyrics such as “what you don’t’ like works”, “let me liberate you”, “do it like it hurts”.  It was one of the things that set the atmosphere for our piece but luckily we managed to pull it off without it.