My group and i felt very strongly against injustice towards individuals with learning difficulties such as ADHD, dyslexia and health care. We've all experienced people in our lives who just wasn't helped properly either by the NHS or schools and this fuelled our passion and influences in our piece.
Notes
photos of information that we combined through our independent research
We printed out little cards with factual information on to give out to our audience.
As a group we researched news, facts and statistics regarding mentall health. This gave us a foundation for our piece. Everything we done was surrounded by our research from facts and stories we found, influenced every desision we made. We believed strongly that in someways the NHS is flawed within helping individuals with mentall health and we wanted to get this across to our audience.
My roles was to show that someone within the health system also treats people with mentall health disability wrongly. In the sense that how a patient was treated differently than the another patient who had a physical disability. In our performance we wanted to show that this behaviour is a catalyst and that acting this way within the health service can transfer to others doing the same or worse which helps people to treat mentall health as a taboo subject. Our aim was to show that a mentall health condition should be treated just as importantly as a physical condition and that mentall health should be openly talked about and should have decent care within the NHS.
I think that our performance was performed in quite naturalist way but involved Brecht techniques, signs and breaking the fourth wall, coming out of character to talk to the audince helped them to understand both patients thoughts feelings and views on their situations. We were showing a realistic situation that's happens to people on a daily basis were local GPs and doctors show a lact of care towards patients and the disappointment expressed by people about the level or care shown towards them and others they care about. I think by doing it that way it added a shock value because people don't expect to see people being mistreated right in front of them, were as I think if we done our protest in a more typical view our audince wouldn't have been as sympathic and cared as much. Doing it in a performance style makes our work more relatable to people because they can relate the situation we shown to them, showing anxiety, depression, physical and mentall discomfort and how people treat you. You immediately think you don't want to be treated like this, this is not right. From the very beginning people in the audince had positive body language towards me I was smiley and happy giving off the impression that I was really nice and would probably be a good person to talk and confide to seeing as I worked in a doctors surgery (GP) as a receptionist. And as soon as I started talking to Naomi the audiences perception of me changed, I could see she was in clear distress and I treated her as if she was abit odd or dulls ion just because she couldn't speak and I couldn't physically see anything wrong with her. I could tell people viewed me differently in a more negative light because they didn't see that coming just as a fact people aren't very educated on mentall health unless they or someone close is experiencing it. I think people automatically views someone within the health care profession at a high standard.
I think my group made an impact on people in different ways. Some people stayed to watch the whole performance and told people to watch the beginning where Naomi was running towards my desk to to ask for help but she couldn't talk. People found interesting and distressful that she had tape on her mouth and I heard people coming up with their own thoughts as to why it's there like. Some said she's mentall trap so she can't express herself, some said anxiety and some said she could be having a break down. It was interesting because a lot of people seemed really engaged and became quiet as soon as they realised we were performing. However because it is a serious subject some people were uncomfortable. I hearsd one girl say " Nahh this is to deep, I can't watch this". Although we wanted people to stay, watch,listen and learn I know it's probably even effecting some people personally and they don't speak of it. And to see people in distress or being mistreated can either provoke different feelings of anger and even people not wanting to deal with those types of feelings.
I believed my group was successful in sharing a political thought with passion and having a clear distinct way of showing it in a creative and engaging way. We had loads loads of information within our piece and we also shared information on sheets and gave them out. We used our space effienctly making sure we used what was there: a desk for the receptionist, the eating area as a waiting are and the wall outside the new theatre as a doctors room.
I think that space awareness wasn't really a flaw because we worked around it. We didn't realise that moving around May be hard when working in an area with people walking about or standing to watch our performance.
Overall Iam really happy with me and my groups performance as I think we discussed and shared our views in an interesting and challenging way and to also make people think differently about things they may not pay much attention to or learn something new that can better the society is an amazing feeling.
