outside my comfort zone

Yes, this performance does not include food, but food was kind of an inspiration for it. I got the idea for this from body image, which is influenced by food. As a female athlete, I have many insecurities with my body. This is actually very common among female athlete's because we are lifting 3+ times a week and gaining muscle in places that some view as manly. I am specifically insecure of my arms and how big they are, which is why I chose to challenge myself by wearing a strappy dress. After doing some research, I found that many female athletes are insecure of their arms and legs too. I believe that these insecurities come from the standards society and Western culture have placed on women. Women are expected to be petite and delicate (as the song "Pretty Woman" implies), but athletes are just the opposite. I wore heels to lift because of the juxtaposition and also because they are commonly worn to please the gaze of others. By lifting weights in heels and a fancy ...

For my re-performance, I chose Marina Abramovic's iconic video performance, "Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful" from 1975.  In Marina's original piece, she aggressively combs her hair for video for about 14 minutes while repeating "art must be beautiful" and "artist must be beautiful" Short clip of Marina's original video performance to get an idea of what I was trying to re-create: My re-performance: The deeper meanings behind the piece are what inspired me to re-perform it. This piece represents a few things: Taking a feminine regarded action and making it aggressive The pain that comes with being a woman Beauty expectations placed upon women by society Entering a trance-like state to free the mind and body from the conventions of Western society and culture Art doesn't have to be beautiful and neither does the artist, but rather it can be disturbing at times The technical aspects of this piece were a...

My concept for this project was to use string or twine as a metaphor for life. I constantly feel pulled in many different directions with class, sports, social groups, and jobs that it can all get a little stressful. By taking twine and wrapping it around different trees and finally around myself, it represents the entanglement of life. There were times when the twine got knotted up, which was simply by chance, but I liked it because life can also get that way at times. We can't always predict what is going to happen and rarely everything goes exactly as planned. There are a lot of things I would like to change about this performance. 1) I would like to perform it live and have the audience scattered throughout the trees or in chairs so that they also get tangled up in the twine. This would represent how others and the relationships/connections we have can make life messy. 2) I would use a lot more yarn or twine so that it would take much longer and create a bigger web in t...

So this performance felt a little confusing and sprung on me, but that is my personal experience with it. Still,  I feel like it came together well and was a great fluxus piece in the end. I missed the two group meetings about this performance because I was at track and absent, so the concepts of others were unclear at first. When we met for the final time before the live performance, I started to grasp the different parts of the performance and what they meant. While the other members of the group made noises using various materials and were conducted around, I was doing my own thing by walking back and forth. I chose and was given this role because my walking boot makes a distinct sound and rhythm when I am consciously walking. The loud and constant banging of the boot allowed a pattern and rhythm as a sort of chaos occurred behind and above me. Merce Cunningham's work also inspired my role because he believed that anything could be dance. I had no music and I was just exagger...