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Irate Jubilation is a synthetic protest.

It’s not the real thing, it just looks like it.

’The piece aims to codify the overall

concept of protest through the

medium of visual representation.

Irate Jubilation reframes protest for

an audience who are numbed to the

raw injustice of the world because

of media and pop culture. Certain

aspects of this physical conveyance

are derived from images found in the

news and online; ones which perhaps

the public dismisses when scrolling

through a Facebook news feed.’

(Nine, 2014, Unpaginated)

Irate Jubilation immerses it’s audience

into a simulated experience of

protest, something that happens

both simultaneously online via a

Facebook feed, and also in real time,

so the audience can choose how to

experience it. They can watch what

happens in front of their eyes, or they

can look at the constant stream of

images and comments on the social

media group that appear on their

mobile phones throughout the event.

Various other immersive elements include ‘the traverse staging to give the

audience a varied perspective alongside a participatory role; the [liveness]…to

introduce people to the atmosphere of a real-life protest; and the sound coming

from underneath the seating to give a feeling of active involvement in the piece.’

(Nine, 2014, Unpaginated)

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There is only one aim.

“Lets bring about change!”

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Inspirations When Nine first set out to create a performance based on protest, it was not our

intention to represent a particular social or political issue. Our aim was instead to

make a visual embodiment of modern demonstrations and to make a comment

on the way that protest is shown in the media. Some of our work derived from pop

culture for example the MIA music video for ‘Born Free’ and Janis Joplin’s ‘Me and

Bobby Mcgee’.

One of our dominant inspirations for the piece was a book called Colours, by

United Colours of Benetton and the way it’s pages made protest seem somehow

beautiful. It was interesting to see how the plight of people so far from ourselves;

some so drastic that they pushed a human being to set themselves on fire,

became something mass produced

and distributed to western society

- to people like ourselves, who had

absolutely no experience of protest.

This then lead us to look at Pussy Riot,

the Russian Feminist performance

art group (freepussyriot.org, 2014,

Unpaginated) who are famous for

their protest performances, music

videos and shocking demonstrations.

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We decided that we wanted to show the glamorous side of protest. We were

particularly interested in the way that world issues, things such as: human rights,

the environment, gender equality, animal rights, are all so commonly mediated

online that modern society has become attached and how nowadays protest

has to be shown as cool or fashionable in order to make people care. ‘The design

of the show gives rise to a type of ironic spectatorship, by which participants are

encouraged to bring about change; when in fact they are not provided with

the tools to do so. Examples of this are the audience being assigned the role of

a protester whilst being restricted to merely sitting and observing.’(Nine, 2014,

Unpaginated)

“The spectacle proclaims the predominance

of appearances and asserts that all human

life, which is to say all social life, is mere

appearance.” (Debord, 1994, page 14)

This was what influenced our decisions on how we presented ourselves in particular,

wearing heavy make-up and modern, provocative clothing, and our choice to use

lots of references to popular culture, for example the heavy metal music which was

inspired by Pussy Riots video ‘Putin lights up fires’ (Pussy Riot, 2013) and our mission

impossible sequence.

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Physical Theatre

As theatre makers, myself and my colleagues work predominantly with physical

theatre. Using movement and gestures as language enabled us to communicate

common cultural signs to our audience who are then able to feel the idea (Keefe

and Murray, 2007, Page 4) for themselves. We worked hard on creating the feel

of protest, and exploring the different protest signifiers. For us there were certain

stereotypes we included, such as middle finger going up, the mooning and mob

formation all of which appears within the first five minutes. The reason we used

gestures, and all the whilst not explicitly telling the audience that they are at a

protest, allowed us to show protest rather than focusing on the various reasons

people to have for going to one.

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‘Performance can be most usefully described as

an ideological transaction between a company

of performers and the community of their audi-

ence’ (Kershaw,1992, Page 16)

We started to go deeper into researching the mediation of protest. One of the

most interesting things we found was the Janis Joplin lyric “freedom is just another

word for nothing left to lose.” (Joplin, 1971) We then took this quote and used it

to create a sequence. We asked each member of the group to show a small

movement that they thought represented the word “freedom” and then “just

another word” and then “nothing left to lose” creating movement sequences

similar to those that can be seen in performances by theatre companies such as

DV8 or Frantic Assembly.

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Mediation

We were also inspired by images of real

protests such as the pianist who played

Chopin in front of the riot police in the

Ukraine last year. However we do not

separate the images from the devised

content, it all just flows as material

throughout the performance which allows our audience to experience the work

in the way it is intended whether they are familiar with the real protests or not.

“The spectacle itself is not a collection of images;

rather, it is a social relationship between people

that is mediated by images.” (Debord, 1994, 12)

By looking at the way protest is mediated

(sofaer,2009, page 27), using real images of

protest we found online, performing them,

and then turning them back into images which

we ourselves post on Facebook, we were able

to manipulate our audience into repeating

our very own research process. Our audience

are constantly mass producing new media

throughout the performance by taking photos

of what we do and posting them (Auslander,

1999, 26/32), but what we are doing is copied

from images we found online and so we end up

making a continuous stream of copied realness

which is a mirror image of what Facebook is, and

the idea that you can re-blog (or copy) things you

like and ignore what you don’t.

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It also challenges the audiences idea of the liveness of protest, because most of

the protests nowadays are either organised online, happen online, or are mediated

online.(Auslander, 1999, page 2) We show how people whom have no first hand

experience of protest, experience it online, but in a detached way, something

that we try to reverse by performing it and posting it on the Facebook feed

simultaneously. It was interesting to us how nowadays Facebook is not only a means

of mediation, or sharing information, it’s an actual cultural context (Auslander,

1999, page 2). By using Facebook we were able to reach people in a means that

we knew they would understand and relate to but subverting it, because we were

using the Facebook feed to make people pay attention to what was happening on

stage, and to make them realise that all the while they were looking at their phones

they were missing all the real-life action. Funnily enough, after the performance we

had noticed that the recognition we received online was huge, far greater than

we had anticipated, and afterwards our audience continued to post feedback on

the Facebook group which gave the piece a lasting effect that we hadn’t given

thought to prior to the event.

The fact that the group remained long after the

performance had finished, gave our audience time

to reflect on what they’d seen and to process it in

relation to their everyday life once they had left

the performance space. It allowed the experience

to continue, and because they are still members

on their Facebook, there is still a reminder in

the corner of the screen of what we have showed

them, and so hopefully the active engagement

with world issues will continue to exist with the

legacy of our performance.

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“As audience members, our understanding

of what we have witnesses is mediated by a

continuation, legacy or after effect of the work

itself.” (sofaer, 2009, page 65)

Audience ParticipationWe employed audience participation as a technique for emotional evolvement

and by using things such as our protest song at the very beginning of our

performance (something that echoes protests of the seventies where peace

and love were at the forefront) we are gaining our audiences trust. What this

does is it sets people up to allow themselves to participate and even enjoy

whats happening on stage, so that later on, when the most fun-filled scene in the

performance transgresses into themes of terrorism and murder, the audience are

emotionally committed to what they’re seeing.

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‘Challenging an audience into rethinking their

assumptions is one of the rationales of contemporary

performance and art in general. Live work uses

the real-time interaction to lead audiences into

unexpected or controversial territories.’ (sofaer,

2009, 45)Moreover, we allow our audience

to become part of the work, as they

contribute to the creation of the

piece through the Facebook page.

The fact that they are allowed to post

pictures or comments throughout the

performance, means that they become

artists, or even protestors, as much as

the performers. This reflects the dawn of

the Facebook news feed, where people

can choose to either ignore, reblog or

comment on social and political issues

that don’t actively affect them as

they scroll past on a computer screen.

Interestingly enough, people don’t

react in the same way to something on

a computer screen to something they

see in real life (Auslander, 1999, page 26)

and so by using audience participation

we encourage our audience to react

in the same way to our online images

as if they were real life happenings

because we perform the images in front

of them before they’re posted online.

This way the audience experience

things in both forms, thus challenging

their detachment to evocative images

online.

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It is in this way that we are asking people

to question the way they view the world

because they can’t look at both their

phone screen and the live performance

- they are forced to choose between the

two at every point in their experience.

Even when Megan Rose is directly asking

people to “look up from their phones”

people are still seeing the words “look up

from your phones” on their phone screen

in front of them. Ironically, although

throughout the piece we are constantly

pleading with people, sometimes even

shouting at them, to get up and help

us, the only time we actually give them

the power to move from their seats is to

help us with the task of moving a prop

which has almost nothing to do with the

protest. We did this in order to render

people powerless, to echo the idea of

protesting behind a computer screen,

which is exactly what our audience are

doing. It raises the question of whether

society’s move into the cyber world is

helping the human race or hindering

it, something that is further explored in

speeches such as Isaac’s and Craig’s

when they talk about the environment

and our relationship with it as Humans.

This is exactly the ironic spectatorship

I discussed earlier, and the idea that

they are restricted to protesting via

Facebook, because they feel too

restricted within the social confines of a

performance space to do anything real.

“In a world that really has been turned on it’s

head, truth is a moment of falsehood” (Debord,

1994,143)

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This concept is explored further as the

performance progresses.The fact that

we are blogging comments about

ourselves and the on-stage action with

hashtags that suggest certain emotional

feeling illustrates the detachment of

our western society with the tragedy of

other, more distant, world issues. This is

prevalent in Megan Rose’s flat reading

of her poem about communication

technology. Because she merely reads

the poem from her phone screen

with no emotional implementation or

characterisation, it could be read that

she has succumbed entirely to the use

of communication technology and

no longer possesses the capability

for human contact, which is evident

considering the audience/performer

relationship of the Facebook group.

Furthermore, we use the mediation to give the performance an alternative

narrative (Giannachi and Kaye, 2011, Page 181), for example Gaby and Diogo’s

dance is shown entirely by mobile phone torches. We create meaning by directing

the light specifically towards Diogo as his speech plays as pre-recorded sound

through the speakers in the space, and as Gaby’s speech is played there is a

moment where she is only lit by the flash photography of our own mobile phones

and the cameras of our audience. This strategy is received ambiguously by our

audience, and it mirrors how social media can be simultaneously harmful and

highlighting. Gaby’s speech in particular is about racial abuse, and as a lone black

performer in the middle of a predominantly white ensemble, the flash photography

comes across as both visually beautiful and also malicious; carrying connotations

of a celebrity being hounded by paparazzi.

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There is also the contributing factor of the footage of this dance is shown in short,

almost unnoticeable clips amongst the projections of protest campaigns earlier

on in the performance. When it occurs again later as a live happening, we then

mediate it all over again by photographing it, once more returning to this cycle of

turning live into mediated, and then realising mediated images. It is from this that

we draw our audiences attention to the medias representation of protest, because

what they cannot see clearly onstage, they can see clearly from the photograph

they’ve taken with the flash from their phone or camera. What the camera doesn’t

capture is the atmosphere, or the feeling of that live moment, a feeling that only

the audience being there can create; something we feel when we are part of

something greater - like a protest.

Sound

The atmosphere of the piece is quite heavily created by sound. We used various

types of sound, both live and mediated for different effects. The protest song, is

probably the most noticeable, in that the live, ‘campfire’ (Peddie, 2009, page 25)

feel of that moment in the performance is nostalgic of festivals from the seventies;

where music was a huge part of peace campaigns. For us the live moments, are

about people striving to be heard, for example Marni who shouts her speech over

the music is clearly trying to get the audience to listen, and take her seriously. The

song itself, is a moment for the audience to join with us in being heard, whether

consciously or not.

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Our use of mediated sound is in contrast to this. The pre-recorded monologues on

the one hand were used to achieve a sense of ‘aural intimacy that can only be

obtained from the reproduction of sound.’ (Auslander 1999, page 35) The particular

speeches we chose for this called upon the necessity of this ‘intimacy’ because

of their nature, either having a particularly internal or reflective quality, or simply

because for speeches such as Amy’s being so personal, we felt they deserved to

be received in a way that was demonstrative of the fact that the audience are

being let in on her private thoughts; something she would not normally declare to

a room full of strangers. There is however, the potential that the recorded sound is

received as ‘material’ (Kendrick, no date, XXII) and this is an echo of the media’s

embellishment of real life - exactly what Amy discusses in her monologue. For my

speech, I chose deliberately to deliver it from behind a microphone, rather than

prerecording it or speaking it unassisted, and this was because I wrote it in the style

of the political spoken word made popular by poets such as Holly Mcnish or Kate

Tempest. The speech itself is a social political comment from a marxist perspective,

and it’s reflective of the mediated voices we see in music videos or on youtube. The

nature of the amplified sound imitated that of a poetry slam, this time however in a

much more sober framework.

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There are moments however, where

the sonic quality and the content

are not so compatible. For example

Megan Rose delivered her speech

fairly inanimately, as if reading it from

her phone screen, as I discussed earlier

to give rise to the idea of technology

taking over from personal experiences.

Although the speech she is giving is

really passionate, her uninterested

delivery of it is quite awkward to listen

to, and yet entirely advantageous to

the point we are making.

Later on in the piece when we develop

our live voices into recorded sound

to show our transition from protesters

into riot police; the audience become

immersed in a soundscape that is an

abstract representation of the ominous

sound of a chaotic protest, with the

beat of stamping feet that replicates

the sound of police marching, growing

louder, and more unrealistic in order to

simulate the approach of a stone-faced

front line of plastic policemen.

‘Immersed in the theatrical sound event, the au-

dience member hears everything, but listens se-

lectively.’ (Bovet as cited in Kendrick, No Date,

page XXIX)

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We also toyed with volume, to energise our audience, both in this instance to

instill in our audience worry and anticipation, but also in the very first moments

of our piece with the heavy metal music, which we used for both impact and

an ‘intrusive’ (Kendrick, No Date, page XIX) quality, that gave the performers an

explosive effect as they walk onto the stage, despite the movement being in slow

motion. The effect of the volume, was intensified by our decision to position the

speakers directly under the audiences seating. We turned up the bass in both of

these sections so that the audience could feel the vibrations of the sound, much

like the rumble of an earthquake, coming from underneath them. This at first, feels

thrilling, but after the progression of the piece from light heartedness to the grim

reality of protest, the foreshadowed feeling of the rumble under the seats turns

from one of excitement to one of fear which is exactly the effect we wanted the

riot police sequence to have. This is juxtaposed very abruptly with Craig’s classical

piano piece, and the soft, emotive music is a stark contrast to the rhythmic thump

of the recorded soundscape, outlining the plea of the man we modelled the

scene on: a protester from the Ukraine who played Chopin to riot police after

numerous after the demonstrations last year. (Classic FM, 2013, Unpaginated)

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Liveness

In order to give our topic the severity that it needed, and to gain full support from

our audience we chose to emphasise the liveness of our performance with a pre-

show set up as a sign in for a real protest. Our performed protest, begins online,

like a real protest, but the audience have no idea what they’re signing up for. We

chose deliberately not to use the word protest because we didn’t want people

to come with a preconceived idea of what the piece was going to be about.The

very nature of the piece is to show a critical study of the forms that protest takes,

and by telling people they were coming to a protest we would encourage them

to believe that the piece was about one particular world issue which defeats the

object of what we aimed to do. It’s also

worth mentioning that we didn’t want to

impose our individual beliefs on both the

rest of the ensemble and the audience.

The work is about both the crowd and the

individual within it, and we wanted to show

both of those.

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“[A]udience awareness and interpretation is

created not just through what happens in the

actual encounter with the work, but from the

information that is discovered prior to arrival, or

retroactively, learnt later on”(Sofaer, 2009, page

23)We were also concerned that bringing protest into the performance space alone

‘may push social and political question to the background’ (Kershaw, 1992, Page

2) because we didn’t want it to be an injustice to peoples suffering. By creating

the anticipation of a real protest, we instantly begin introducing a sense of active

participation, making the audience question what kind of event they had enrolled

themselves into (Sofaer, 2009, page 15) and committing themselves to be a part of

our plight. This commitment is something we exploit with the moments of audience

participation, for example when they join in with our protest song.

“Contemporary culture is marked by the eman-

cipation of the spectator and the transformation

of the audience from passive recipient to active

participant.” (Sofaer, 2009, Page 7)

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We also noticed that for some people; it could be their first experience of protest,

and our performance allows them to experiment with a real experience in

imaginary circumstances away from ‘norms, customs regulations, laws which

govern [their] life in society (Turner as cited in Kershaw, 1992, Page 24); perhaps

even encouraging them to attend a real protest in the future. Furthermore, by

bringing people into the performance space, and away from the restriction of

the outside world, we encourage them to push their own personal and social

boundaries and “bring about change” for “those who need fighting for.”

“Perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself;

but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution!”

(Boal et al, 2000, 155)

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Staging

The potential for our audience to “bring about change” is developed in our

decision to seat our audience in traverse. It was reflective of different social political

views that people attending may come with, and the fact that they may not all

experience the performance in the same way mirrors this. We really play on the

audiences perspective, for example in the mission impossible sequence, one side

of the audience can see the faces of the victims, and the other side see the faces

of the terrorists. The audience can also see each other, and so are able to gauge

a sense of the opposite sides experience by watching them. However regardless of

the side on which you choose to sit, or what perspective you view the piece from,

you still leave having been as much a part of the piece as everyone else. People

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share photos of their experience on the Facebook group, and so all the best

moments are shared with the rest of the audience. It is this that allows us to create

both a sense of community for our audience (Sofaer, 2009, Page 37), whilst also

playing on the oppositional composition of the traverse staging.

References

- Auslander, P. (1999). Liveness. London: Routledge.

- Boal, A. (2000). Theatre of the oppressed. 1st ed. [ebook] London: Pluto Press.

Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g8ZbuK6AlqsC&printsec=frontc

over&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false [Accessed 4 Jan.

2015].

-Chatzichristodoulou, M. (n.d.). Cyberformance? Digital or Networked

Performance? Cybertheaters? Or Virtual Theatres? ...or all of the above?.

[online] cyposium.net. Available at: http://www.cyposium.net/wp-content/

uploads/2012/09/maria_text.pdf [Accessed 4 Dec. 2014].

-Classic FM, (2013). Pianist plays Chopin in front of Ukraine riot police Read more

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riot-police/#6fcFTyyBFwy4s9Ri.99. [online] p.Unpaginated. Available at: http://

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[Accessed 16 Dec. 2014].

-Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

-Freepussyriot.org, (2014). About | FREE PUSSY RIOT. [online] Available at: http://

freepussyriot.org/about [Accessed 14 Dec. 2014].

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org/collections/special/columns/comparing_notes/content_images/Ukraine%20

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-Giannachi, G. and Kaye, N. (2011). Performing Presence: Between the live and the

simulated. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p.181.

-Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2009). The Frantic Assembly book of devising theatre.

London: Routledge.

-Joplin, J. (1971). Me and Bobby Mcgee. [CD] Columbia.

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-Kershaw, B. (1992). The politics of performance. London: Routledge.

-Lecoq, J., Carasso, J., Lallias, J. and Bradby, D. (2009). The moving body. London:

Routledge

-Minnesota.pulbicradio.org, (n.d.). A Pianist At The Barricades. [image] Available at:

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-Peddie, I. (2006). The resisting muse. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.

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