What Is The Negative And Positive Aspects Of My Performance

On March 14th, I performed a piece that focused on the contradictions of winning an award. Through lights, costume, sound, and audience participation people would boo me whenever I got a word wrong and I had to practice it all over again. I tried to use all of the theories and lessons I’ve learned this far in the semester to be as effective as possible. Through this paper, I will be examining the negative and positive aspects of my performance and how I believed it worked.
I chose an award that I had won for Storytelling a semester ago. I chose this object because I had been working in the field and competing for this particular competition for two years. The competition was filled with students that I know and friends that I’ve made within …show more content…
The sound of an orchestra tuning playing as I was pacing and trying to highlight important parts of the piece helped bridge the gap of performing a distinguished space. I believe I had, at least, the start of an alienation effect by having the audience boo at me when I messed up, however, I believe the most successful part of this aspect was when I had them boo when I completed it without errors. The contradiction of the audience booing whether I make a mistake or whether I do a perfect run symbolized to me how one can never practice enough and one can never see themselves as doing good enough. I also believe my interpretation of the object was abstract enough that most people did not immediately pick up what it was, but were able to understand the emotions I wanted to attach to the object. I’ve had the greatest difficulty with trying to be abstract in this class and I continue to strive to improve at this. I wanted to show the hard hours, time, and mistakes one has to go through in order to win something like this award. Through the comments I received on Monday, it came to my understanding that this was successful. However, I had people coming up to me afterward and asking me what my object was and had an initial surprise when I first told them, but then I was informed that it made sense. This signified to me that I was relatively successful in my …show more content…
I took careful note of my costuming on the day. Everything was right down to exact kind of “messy bun” hairstyle. However, I believe this may have been too subtle of a costume choice. I don’t know if my audience truly understood the impact of the contradiction I was trying to make with the distinguished surroundings with myself being how society would deem “a mess”. If I were to execute the same idea I would try to make the costume choice more obvious. I also picked too long of a piece to perform, which meant that my pacing suffered. I varied the pace in my speech to be “correct” before I made my mistakes and to speed up once I started making mistakes. However, I was worried about going over time. If I had picked a shorter piece, I may have been able to do this more