This class was……interesting to say the least.
Now before you say anything, I need you to know that I HAD to take this class to complete a requirement okay? Typically I would not have taken this class of my own accord, but if I want to graduate I have to take this class.
I have very mixed feelings about this class. At the end of the day, I enjoyed it looking back on everything that I did.
This course explored how artists can use different performance techniques to transform a piece of writing (poem) into something completely different. Although this was an introductory course into expressive performance, it pushed each student FAR outside of their comfort zones to explore how they want to express certain ideas, messages, convictions, emotions, and even their own thoughts. At the end of the day, I have to realize that I had a blast in this course. It was completely different than ANYTHING I had ever taken before. Interestingly, this drastic difference is precisely why it was a struggle for me. I am by no means an actor, but the assignments in this class forced me to think about a certain idea from many different angles and tasked me with selecting a perspective to PHYSICALLY express throughout my entire performance. To do this we studied, practiced, and crafted many artistic abilities and attributes we utilized in our performances. These performance topics ranged from death, promotions, racism, birth, tragedy, stagnation, and many more. With all of these different topics and target emotions, we were able to gain a great amount of experience playing around with these attributes.
We were consistently thrown out of our comfort zones to explore the unknown. Students were tasked with creating their own stories and directing other students to help express their story, groups of students were given a piece of writing and given a random emotion to depict in the overall end product of the performance, we were given the challenge of finding our own written pieces to perform, and many other challenges. This class was very hard for me because of how uncomfortable it made me. From the very first day of class, I knew I needed to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. Accepting this feeling helped me in the class, but it was still challenging to work u the courage to stand on the stage to perform very emotional performances.
This class taught me that true inner strength comes from being comfortable in the uncomfortable. One can get through anything if they approach the challenge with the right mentality of “I know I am scared, but that will not stop me from succeeding.” I enjoyed this class and am very thankful that I took part in this class. I recommend this course to anyone who wants to be pushed to find their self confidence! It is NOT AN EASY task, but you will definitely find confidence in your work by the end of the course.