Final Performance Analysis Essay

Final Performance Analysis
Our performance was based on an earlier performance that happened as such. In order to satirize a law recently passed in Arizona, which allowed anybody to be pulled over with suspicion of being an illegal immigrant, we dressed up as police officers and pulled over obviously legal citizens in order to make a point. One can’t be pulled over simply on the grounds that they could be illegal immigrants - This means anybody with darker skin, basically.
Now that I’ve sent the context, I’ll move onto our performance in front of the class. As performers we did a terrible job, with the exception of one or two. Everything was read off the paper and there was no connection with the audience. There’s a big difference between the way
you read something and the way you speak to somebody. Our medium was voice. No meter, rhyme, alliteration, was used in our performance. It wasn’t creative. I can understand the absence of rhyme and alliteration, as it’s a more serious performance, but meter was nonexistent and could have helped engage the audience more.
Sociohistorically, our campaign made a lot of sense. It’s true that illegal migration is on the rise and it’s also true that many people are being falsely accused of being illegal immigrants, but not in our area and not to the audience we had. I don’t think we targeted the right audience with our social campaign and that affected the audience’s ability to really focus and feel for our activist campaign. That reason exactly is why our campaign decided to be located in Arizona, where this law and the migration problems are a big deal, especially over an area like Davis, California. We tried to lead the audience with a positive rhetoric, allowing them to ask questions, being rather transparent, not forcing anything upon them, and provided them opinions of not just us, but also some bystanders from the campaign scene in Arizona. A positive rhetoric allows people to make their own decisions where people aren’t manipulated into believing something. However, in the process of our activist campaign, we used a negative rhetoric on our subjects (our subjects being those
we stopped for being “illegal immigrants”). We forced a lot of information down their throats with leaflets, false persecution, and only allowed them to speak to one centralized group - us. This was necessary or else we feared they wouldn’t get the idea if we were too easy or lenient with them. We had to make our beliefs very clear with the white politicians we pulled over. Overall, I think our performance on stage wasn’t amazing. I did find some things interesting. We managed to organize ourselves quickly and without much pain after somebody took charge. During our performance, I think we did a good job answering questions. I loved the question about going to jail. Somebody asked “Did you guys go to jail for impersonating police officers?” We answered yes, we were aware of our consequences and accepted them in order to get across a belief that