Protest Update #2

When we started devising this time, we worked out that to grab attention, we would stage this idea of restraint being ‘unfair’ through the guise of playing a game, and therefore those that used restraint inappropriately were ‘playing dirty’. The game that looked most similar to our blocking was ‘Grandma’s footsteps’, and once a patient touched the shoulder of a Doctor, the idea of a fun game (firstly attention grabbing as it intrigues an audience that are expecting to see an angry protest), would be flipped on its head as the ‘Grandmas’ (Doctors) would turn around and aggressively use face down restraint on the patient. This gave way to all three doctors having ‘The system’ on their backs instead of having ‘A doctor’ in the middle, and this was also due to the fact that after several runs of this idea, it became clear that the distinction between ‘A Doctor’ and ‘The System’ would be unclear to people potentially only paying a passing glance to the protest. However, we would further highlight the idea that we are protesting ‘inappropriate’ use of the restraint by having a big tally chart stuck to the wall that we are performing near, with the headline ‘Inappropriate use of face down restraint’, that we would add to with black paint in a nearby bucket after every ‘round’ of the game. Having the black paint dripping off our hands and dirtying the clothes of the patients adds an element of the grotesque, foreshadowing how the lines will be blurred between ‘game’ and ‘abuse’ later in the in the protest as it marks the end of each ‘cycle’ and therefore also acts as the beginning of the protest. Our final work for our last session of refining was condensed into the questions: How can we make use of the personal connection that the actors made with audience members in our showcase of the protest (which was praised in feedback)? Can we use certain speech to further clarify the message?