Job Title: Actor for punishment spectacle. Role of a condemned.
Reports To: The actor will report to the casting director, scriptwriter, director of terror and the audience.
Job Overview: Acting of punishment became easier than ever. Your body will not be torn apart and you will not be executed in front of the audience since “the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” . “Punishment, if I may so put it, should strike the soul rather than the body”. The spectacle “has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man”. Also, who knows, maybe the audience would intervene and set you free during a public execution. “Confronted with the reality of torture, tendency of audience is to identify with the victim”. We don’t want them to sympathize with you and change the focus of their anger on the executioner. So it is decided. You will play in the penal ritual and get a psychiatric examination. In the prison, you will get up “at the first drum-roll”, work “for nine hours a day throughout the year”, pray for less than an hour a day. Workshops, school, accommodation, and meals are provided.
Responsibilities and Duties: Although you won’t be publicly tortured in a court, you will participate in terror staging of real life. “Theatrical convention allows for splitting of mind from body, enabling the audience to respond either emotionally or intellectually to the action it sees on stage without responding physically”. We will reveal corpses, torture on streets, create own media narratives so that the audience will get blindfolded with their emotions and fear.
However, you must be noted that we have rivals in real theatres who “turn the gaze back onto the blinding apparatus itself”. They invite the audience “to transgress, to see that which should never be seen”. It reminds them that “terror deterritorializes” and they are all foreigners in their houses. But they “are not being victimized”; they “have a capacity for choice and for action”. For you, it means that your acting in terror and court structures must be flowless to make people feel powerless against them.
Qualifications: You will be accepted to the role based on the following stereotypes.
• Stereotype of social crisis, moral causes or natural disaster. 14 “Rather than blame themselves, people inevitably blame either society as a whole which costs them nothing, or other people who seem particularly harmful for easily identifiable reasons.”
• And “thanks to poison, it is possible to be persuaded that a small group, or even a single individual, can harm the whole society without being discovered”. So even you an individual can be blamed for society-wide harm.
• You will get even more chances to be selected is you “belong to a class that is particularly susceptible to persecution rather than because of the crimes you have committed” . You are welcome to be condemned if you are an ethnic and religious minority.
• But mainly you will be judged on whether you are as different as expected and blamed “in the end for not differing at all”.