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Make Up for Ourselves

I really enjoyed working on project three and had a lot of fun collaborating with the women in my group, but I don’t know how much I enjoyed the art we created. It was fun and felt engaging but not necessarily powerful. 

I loved doing make up and using each other as mirrors. It felt engaging because I had a very simple goal of putting on make up as best I could while helping the person across from me do make up as well. There’s something to be said for art which involves simple but active engagement with a partner on stage. I also adored making the sound score with poems and songs woven together. We got some mixed feedback on that part so maybe we needed more direct focus on the sound? 



I believe we had too many ideas that we tried to squish together unsuccessfully though. We knew going into this piece that it wasn’t very audience centered and I didn’t mind that aspect, until we had an audience and they weren’t super involved. I almost wish we could have invited other female identifying people up to the table and did make up with them, because for me, this piece should not have been engaging to men. It was for us (the performers) but it especially wasn’t for them.

Performance Art seems to be about taking things to their most extreme logical conclusion and I know that extremity was not in this piece. I also wonder if maybe the inner message wasn’t extreme enough though? Because I can’t think of any other extreme that could have been taken that wouldn’t have changed the meaning of the piece.

All in all, this was fun to work on and the people were great to work with. But I hope we can collaborate on other pieces and not try and move this one forward.

Comments

  1. SandraMay 10, 2018 at 8:36 AM

    I just wrote a lengthy comment and it disappeared!

    ReplyDelete
  2. SandraMay 10, 2018 at 8:44 AM

    I will try again! I think the reason this piece did not go anywhere is because it was what it was and did not push any buttons. You hit upon reasons in your comments, Cassie. The audience was not engaged -- they were wondering what it was about, what to think about. Performance art is idea based and the ideas come from life -- be they absurd or mysterious or confrontational. It is meant to challenge, provoke, engage an audience - bc it is live. Topics include mortality, work, food, sex, money, the consumer culture, etc. This work maybe was going in too many directions? It did not involve your audience, nor did it have a direct, powerful message. But! This class was a place for you to experiment and explore ideas and this is what you did. This process pushed you further and helped you create your final work.

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