Before I presented, I was worried. I wasn’t used to this freedom to take whatever approach I wanted to an assignment, and I felt lost in deciding what I wanted to do for this self-portrait. I was afraid that my portrait would be too simple and I didn’t know if it would bore the other students to have them sit and watch me fold a heart and write out what I loved.
To my surprise, during my presentation, I felt comfortable, relaxed, and completely at ease. The previous fears of not having “good enough” of a portrait faded as I became immersed in presenting the portrait about what I loved and found truly important to me.
As with Milan’s performance that I videotaped, each self-portrait revealed a chunk about each student that I otherwise would have never known if I had just met him/her in another class. Even though Milan and I were given the same assignment, we each approached the task very differently.
Milan’s performance centered more on him; as an audience, we focused more on his motions, emotions and facial expressions. He repeatedly shuffled through his papers and backpack, each time with a more distressed expression and distraught sigh than the last. However, as he was doing this, I found a rhythm in his movements, as a sigh of frustration would follow each wrinkling of papers. Within his feelings of possible stress and annoyance, I was able to relate to him because I have been through times where searching for something just seems like an impossible task.
In my portrait, I aimed to move the attention off of me and instead, onto the pieces I would create and hang up on the wall. I wanted to expose bits and pieces of my personality through the heart that I folded and the slips of post-its and cutouts that I taped onto the wall. As opposed to Milan’s portrait where we got to learn about him through watching his actions, the audience had to learn about me through my props.
I really liked how Milan made us wonder – during his performance, I wondered about what he was looking for, what was bothering him, and what he was looking at when concentrated on the books he had in front of him. Unlike Milan, I was more open about myself because I placed my writings and creations up on the wall for display. We also differed in how he was on more of a “stage”, and slightly removed from the rest of the class because there was that separation of the performer and the audience, while I walked around the room to hand out the little hearts.
Both our portraits were similar in our “spontaneity”, one might say. After he told us that he had improvised on the spot after not finding his original props for his portrait, I realized that what we learned about during his performance might have been completely different if he had stuck with his original plans. I also unintentionally improvised because I originally thought to write only “Friends and Family” on the inside of the heart, but as I was writing, I decided to add more personal words, like “Secrets, Thoughts, Wonders, Love, Hope” in the different quadrants of the paper that I would later fold into a heart. In this sense, we both added parts to our performance that created something that better reflect our inner thoughts and feelings.
Although our pieces were very different from each other’s and from those of the rest of the class, each portrait brought me a little closer to each student, and I really appreciated that. I’m happy to say that this class is starting to open up as a “sacred space” for me, and hopefully in time, for each of the student of the class as well.
