Brecht research

Theatre for Brecht was "a hammer to shape society" in his own words, Brecht attempts to present the "double nature of reality" where the audience are not meant to get comfortable. This video allowed me to understand the V-effect to a greater extent summarasing it as "to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar", also seeing in this video examples of v-effect techniques on stage eg having the stage personal on the stage, making sound effects in front of the audience, destroying all of the walls that would usually separate the audience and the action and instead allowing the audience to be the action through the challenging style of Brecht's Epic Theatre

Reseaarch into: Politics in Theatre

after watching this video I have a greater understanding of political theatre. It is clear that some writers intend to be political with the work they write and some just have underlying themes that highlight a political  issue or situation even slightly. I can now begin to understand that most theatre could definitely be considered as political. This was a helpful video that allowed me to see what actual modern play writes believed 'Political Theatre' could be.

Exclusion, Misrepresentation and Discrimination: Still Prevalent for Women in American Media and Politics - Student Pulse

Exclusion, Misrepresentation and Discrimination: Still Prevalent for Women in American Media and Politics - Student Pulse

FEMALES AND MISREPRESENTATION

From this very detailed article I fully understood with examples how women are misrepresented in the media. There is a lack of women who actually look like real women on TV in roles that everyday normal women take part in, women are stereotyped and made voiceless due to their gender and the immaturity of those who report news.
Women who are not feminine gain little highlight or space in the media. And I think that there could definitely be something we can play on during our protest, like preventing women from saying anything intellectual or pushing the idea that women care more about their looks and those who don't are "lesbians" or "extreme feminists" this idea of hyperbole language and labels could defo be used in our protest. eg. labelling the audience with how the media shows them to be even if they don't say something that conforms to the stereotype.  

Political Protest (further research)

We finally narrowed down what topic we would explore for our political protest. Misrepresentation of minority groups in the media. This was a topic which is still relevant and will continue being relevant till there is appropriate representation and a lack of bias in how news is told to the masses.Also this episode of Scandal staring Kerry Washington was ringing in my mind looked at representation of the main character by the American public "dog whistle politics" (Dog whistle politics usually refers to the use of certain code words or phrases that are designed to be understood by only a small section of the populace.)  and they showed a great biasd which was real and interesting and I was eager to find out more


basically the media is shown as getting away with using little words that if not magnified don't say anything to the general public but when the group targeted by the phrasing knows exactly what it means.

Research 

I conducted some research finding out what minority groups there were and how they weren't properly represented in the media eye. I tried t find evidence of the media actually misrepresenting groups that usually do not have a voice in public or who's voices are warped in order to coincide with an image or stereotype that society is used to seeing. 

Black males

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/media-misrepresents-black-men-effects-felt-real-world

After reading this article I found that:

 Lives of males in the US adversely affected by negative public perceptions 

Eg being turned from jobs

Police suspicion - a thing black males in Britain search they are 90% more likely to be stopped and searched and only 2% of those stops and searches lead to actual arrests or convictions 

Black males are seen as being aggressive or even beastly the article references what Michael Browns killer Police Officer Darren Wilson said about Michael Brown "“when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” even though the two men had the same height."

The article references a 2011 study *( http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/Media-Impact-onLives-of-Black-Men-and-Boys-OppAgenda.pdf )* on the impact of this misrepresentation "negative mass media portrayals were linked with lower life expectations among black men" helping to create barriers to the progression of black males within society and they also normalised these barriers as if they were natural or to be expected "inevitable" says the article.

The article gives a clear example of the median misrepresentation of the 1967 riots saying the reporting was inadequate and exaggerated. This calls back a memory of a post sir made on his blog that showed the same newspapers report of a protest outside parliament and how they were so contradictory and one was inflammatory and the other less so. 

At this stage I thought of several ideas for our performance possibly asking black people who'd walk past "trapping" or "leading" questions to get them to say something the media would frame them as so asking if a black student had a job and then their answer would probably be no  this would then push the idea black people are unemployed and that's a norm for them to be out of work, which is a common misconception of Black males shown in the media. The triggering or leading questions would be demoralising and negative for the person being questioned and those who'd see this would then understand this is how the median forceful Misrepresentation impacts young black males. This was slightly inspired by the article which did mention a negative impact on black males self-esteem due to the media representation which leads them on to "internalising the biases and stereotypes" and then perpetuate the misrepresentations.

I know understood further from this article that the plight of black males is strongly impacted by the media Misrepresentation  and have solid ideas for the questions to ask during our protest.

Another interesting article was done by the huffington post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darron-t-smith-phd/black-men-media_b_2844990.html

Women

Obviously prior to this research I was aware of a biased in how women are shown in movies film and other forms of the media. There has  always been the generic categorising of females with them either being the mother, the whore or the house wife and it has been hard for females to break away from these stereotypes and be more than just a pretty face without a voice. This is shown as women who are in high positions are often asked very superficial questions and shown in the media as the female stereotype or an outrage anarchist corrupting the minds of young children because they don't fit into societies already pre-described boxes.

Political Protest

Misrepresentation of Minorities in the Media.

The final topic we chose to do our protest on was misrepresentation of minorities in the media. The day we ended up doing our performance was several days after the attacks in Paris and it was a very tense time in the media on how they were portraying 'terrorist' assailants after this tragic event. This ended up impacting what we discussed. 

We chose to become the media and demoralise, label and categorise the students of the brit school in order to show in a clear way what the media does to minority groups.

Minority groups 

Minority group is a term referring to a category of people differentiated from the social majority, i.e. those who hold the majority of positions of social power in a society, and may be defined by law. Rather than a relational "social group", as the term would indicate, minority group refers to the above-described.

Research: Protest 10/11/15

Research for political protest
we had several ideas for the political protest
the first being police brutality
- Police brutalitity is a massive issue all over the world, but mostly in the United States of Americaa where police have a tendency to kill unarmed men and women and even several teenagers and young children. There were many police caused deaths in the past few years, with over 150 protests occuring in the wake of the deaths of people due to brute police force. The high profile killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson last August is what made me aware of this issue in the american police force, where police officers were murdering and slaughtering innocent people because they had a gun and badge.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michael-brown-shooting-ten-things-we-know-or-know-better-now-the-ferguson-grand-jurys-work-is-over-9881046.html 
Brown's killer was not charged with the murder and the case is not the only one like it, police have brutalised many American citizens and faced very minimal repercussions.

This topic was extremely emotive and current but then when brain storming how to stage it, the group decided we would not have enough time to it justice and another idea was bubbling on the surface of our general discussions about the media.
We realised that the media is biased, no outlet is innocent of choosing a side and presenting it. And then we looked at topics of discrimination and marginalisation and realised that the topic of "Media Misrepresentation" was current and affected all of us, so we went away and researched what it meant and evidence of it today. We focused soely on the misrepresention of margenalised groups in the media, for exaample black males, teenagers, women