Box the Pony Speech
Box the Pony, Leah Purcell
Today I’m going to talk about two themes that Leah Purcell raises in her performance “Box the Pony, which are both stereotyping and assimilation Towards the Aboriginal people. I’m also going to talk about the techniques in which she uses to help convey these ideas across to her audience like, blocking, dialect, dramatic pauses, physicalization and juxtaposition
My first theme I’m going to talk about is how Leah Purcell uses stereotyping in her performance. Stereotyping is when a person or a group make judgements on another person or group without knowing them. Leah Purcell finds that because of racial discrimination and stereotyping from the European people she has been left out from society. An example of stereotyping in Box the Pony is when Leah turns up to the real estate agency and speaks one word, “G’day”. The real estate agent immediately stereotypes Leah into what she thinks Aboriginals are which is poor and violent, and spurts out, “we haven’t any money, we haven’t any money, take what you want”. With the use of humour in this part and the technique of dialect and blocking, she lightens up any tension in the audience which enables her to follow up with otherwise would be rude or distasteful comments. My second example of stereotyping comes from scene 2. “She grabs her bag and goes, like I was going to hit her or something, she backs in her gate, up the path falls in the front door, rolls up the hall way doing backward somersaults in slow motion”. Leah then follows this with a dramatic pause to let her audience think about what just happen. She over exaggerates this part to help her again to push the message to the audience about how Europeans stereotype Aboriginals to be violent. In turn using physical techniques like miming the actions of the frantic woman helps Leah Purcell’s convey the idea of how Europeans stereotypes Aboriginals to be poor and violent. In turn Leah tries to give the message that she was very excluded
Today I’m going to talk about two themes that Leah Purcell raises in her performance “Box the Pony, which are both stereotyping and assimilation Towards the Aboriginal people. I’m also going to talk about the techniques in which she uses to help convey these ideas across to her audience like, blocking, dialect, dramatic pauses, physicalization and juxtaposition
My first theme I’m going to talk about is how Leah Purcell uses stereotyping in her performance. Stereotyping is when a person or a group make judgements on another person or group without knowing them. Leah Purcell finds that because of racial discrimination and stereotyping from the European people she has been left out from society. An example of stereotyping in Box the Pony is when Leah turns up to the real estate agency and speaks one word, “G’day”. The real estate agent immediately stereotypes Leah into what she thinks Aboriginals are which is poor and violent, and spurts out, “we haven’t any money, we haven’t any money, take what you want”. With the use of humour in this part and the technique of dialect and blocking, she lightens up any tension in the audience which enables her to follow up with otherwise would be rude or distasteful comments. My second example of stereotyping comes from scene 2. “She grabs her bag and goes, like I was going to hit her or something, she backs in her gate, up the path falls in the front door, rolls up the hall way doing backward somersaults in slow motion”. Leah then follows this with a dramatic pause to let her audience think about what just happen. She over exaggerates this part to help her again to push the message to the audience about how Europeans stereotype Aboriginals to be violent. In turn using physical techniques like miming the actions of the frantic woman helps Leah Purcell’s convey the idea of how Europeans stereotypes Aboriginals to be poor and violent. In turn Leah tries to give the message that she was very excluded