Political Protest Evaluation

Political Protest Rehersals andEvaluation

For our political protest we wanted to do something different and something that wasn't a common and recurring issue that would be predictable. We decided as a group to target the issue of illegal organ harvesting which is a rising issue across the globe. We really think that it deserves a platform of awareness and we quickly became strongly passionate about it.

Originally we thought that organ harvesting was a smaller issue than it actually is. I read an article about the massive numbers of the crime in China. It was shocking to see how much it rocked a nation http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3027088/A-Human-Harvest-Chinas-organ-trafficking-exposed-shocking-documentary-alleges-illegal-trade-worth-staggering-1-billion-year.html
It's important to realise this is just one country of many that are victims of this crime.
Here are some facts on our illegal organ harvesting.

v  Organ trafficking accounts for five to 10 per cent of all kidney transplants worldwide

v  Some people have become victims of body snatching or involuntary organ donation

v  In the U.S., there have been accusations (though no proof) of allowing patients on life support to die in order to remove the organs while the heart is still beating.

v  Corrupt doctors often target children, especially those from poor backgrounds or children with disabilities for organ harvest.

v  Some donors have resorted to selling their organs on eBay

v  Nato documents leaked in 2011 claimed that Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci was the head of a “mafia-like” network responsible for organ trafficking (among other things).

v  Organ brokers in China advertise their services by using clever slogans such as “Donate a kidney, buy the new iPad!"

v  Patients (many of whom go to China, India or Pakistan for surgery) can pay up to $200,000 (nearly £128,000) for a kidney to traffickers who harvest organs from vulnerable, desperate people, sometimes for as little as $5,000.

To raise awareness on the issue we decided to do our protest in the main canteen of our school, this is because not only is it a popular location, it is also a space that will give us the versatility to play with many ideas and routes of communicating our issue across. As an audience member it would be quite hard hitting to have to face an issue regarding surgery, organs and blood when next to food, much like Brecht we wanted to provoke thought and meaning. We wanted a reaction from our audiences, we were not going to with-hold our protest's explicitness for the sake of our audience's comfort but so that no one felt physically sick or un-hygienic we decided to hold it at the end of the canteen away from the fresh food. This could also be seen as something quite symbolic as the distance from us and the fresh food could show the  difference between the Less Economically Developed countries (the ones who have a high number of illegal organ harvesting) and the More Economically Developed countries
.
As a group we created the concept of a restaurant to be the lay-out of our political protest. We wanted to literally serve people a slice of reality as we felt that illegal organ harvesting is such an under-discussed issue. The restaurant was to be called 'The Harvester'  which we thought was slightly humorous and familiar to the audience. This would make it easier to beckon people to sit down at the restaurant and to invite them over, it would only be a moment of time before they realised that there were much darker undertones to the name. We created some place-mats and menus to help create our restaurant theme. These place-mats presented true facts and information about organ harvesting and we found this was a really useful tool in communicating to people the extent of the issue without us breaking from character.

We decided to have Sam and Charlie as waiters at the restaurant and they were to serve food to the seated guests. Sasha was the manager figure of the restaurant enticing people to sit down and I was to pretend I was a member of the audience. After a few people were seated I would  then be grabbed by Sam and Charlie and thrown on to a table where they would illegally harvest my heart. Then the people seated would be served it and other organs on a plate. For this we used real lamb organs, they look almost exactly the same as human organs but they were slightly smaller.  With all these ideas to work through and planning to do I found that our group did a lot of talking and not so much practically putting those ideas into place; also due to the busy location when we went there to look at planning our piece we couldn't easily access all the space easily without being forced to disturb people... which as peaceful protesters we didn't want to do.

I do think that our piece has successful moments and some unsuccessful ones. A lot of people were slightly thrown off by the fact that there was raw meat and organs around our set yet at the same time it did bring some people to the table to sit down as they were intrigued. I think having raw lamb organs in my chest was a success as when our plan began to fall apart I found that it was a conversation starter and a way to get people involved.