Performing my self-portrait was a particularly unique experience for me. I didn’t imagine that I would be so uncomfortable and as nervous as I was. I expected to be a little anxious and scared but never to the extent that I felt when it was time for me to portray myself in front of the class. I don’t consider myself a very introverted person, so I had a false sense of bravery that quickly dissolved once the silence fell and almost 20 pairs of eyes beamed up at me. Thinking about my experience, it amazes me to see how fellow classmates who come off as a little more introverted than I am found the courage to perform or present to us in the way that they did.

The person that I filmed was Prima. Her presentation in my opinion was very interesting and revealed a lot about her character. She requested that everyone come close to where she was working and while that would’ve drove me into a panic attack, the more intimate setting seemed to relax her as she cut the different pieces of herself apart and then put them back together again. Before she even started it was a beautiful piece of art but as one of my colleagues expressed after her presentation, just watching her cut out the pieces of paper was mesmerizing. Her portrait gave me the impression that she is a very articulate person and while very exact and logical, she is also very creative. All of the bright colors made me feel that maybe there is a more outgoing side that she doesn’t normally convey in the classroom and the fact that there were so many different colors, shapes and sizes told me that her personality is very multifaceted. There are different traits and experiences that make her who she is and though they all may be different, each part is a contributing factor to what makes Prima, Prima.

Our presentations were very different but also in a way, very similar. She decided on a more intimate setting and was stationary throughout her portrait, while I moved a lot around the room. That alone says so much about the type of people we are. I am a very haphazard person who goes from idea to idea constantly while she may be a more stable minded person who sticks to one thing and focuses on it. In spite of that obvious difference, we both included a more personal element by creating the prop or props that we used during our performance. I’m actually not sure exactly what this means about a persons character. Maybe it says that we enjoy the childish element in our lives or that we are both very hands on and practical.

All in all I really enjoyed watching all of the self-portraits that I saw and I learned things about my classmates that I honestly did not expect. It is interesting to discover the deeper layer of the personalities of people you see everyday and would not be able to gather from your normal, everyday reactions. I learned more about myself and that with people there is always more than what you outwardly see.

-Yasmin (Blog A)

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.