WORKSHOP:
This week was our final workshop before the presentations and proposals of our group workshops based on the topic home and human flow.
This workshop was grounding and allowed me to reflect on what happened in the workshop last week and to think about the main themes of that workshop.
PROJECT
At this moment, I can feel myself undergoing a transformation and I can feel myself inching closer and closer to my final self every day. I’m not sure what my final form will be yet but I feel that I am evolving.
I wanted to make a piece that showed a transformation. So this week I went to the project room and performed a transformative performance, I transformed both physically through my clothes and through my body language.
I dressed in an immature manner, at first , in my dungarees to show my inner child. I felt so immature in the clothes that I was wearing and I found the importance of clothes in how I feel, I never noticed this feeling so organically before. Because I felt so immature, I met my inner tennager which I did not expect. I felt so in-between being in my adult body put being dressed so infantile. I tried to emulate the feeling of being awkward as a teenager, I wasn’t expecting to find her. I had the feeling that I had when I was teenage, where I felt that I knew absolutely nothing and felt everything.
Being a teenager is so vulnerable, and I feel like the teenage version of me is synonymous with the the most vulnerable version of me. I felt when I was teenager I had so many feelings and no way to deal with them. To counter act this, I started to move my body in the way that my 16-year-old would have wanted to, in an inhabited and confident way, in the way in wish I could have when I was younger.
After moving as my teenage self, I had an intermission to do my make up and start my transformation into my self now (or a version of myself). I purposely over acted this part, to remind myself that I am being watched. I always feel that I am being watched by the male gaze and the patriarchy. The male gaze plays a lot into my identity, even though I do not accept the agendas of misogyny and the patriarchy, it still does unfortunately have some control over me and my gender expression. Instead of resisting this patriarchal gaze, I decided to play into the gaze, not because I enjoy playing to it, but because I don’t know how to get away from being looked at. I thought instead: why not give them something to look at in a parodied way? By overacting this traditionally ‘feminine’ action of putting on makeup I felt that I was challenging the male gaze by saying: ‘ I know that you’re looking at me’
For the final part of my transformative performance, I once again played into the male gaze and shed my clothes and put on a skirt. I felt that I resembled an untrained ballet dancer. I then danced to Vivaldi’s Four Season- Spring. This was an impulsive choice of a song, but a necessary and fitting choice, as the music feels traditionally feminine and Spring is about transformations.
