Group Performance Blog on In-Class activity

The in-class performance that I have enjoyed the most is the class when we performed the tomato exercise. At first our instructions were to thoroughly describe the taste, touch, smell, sound, and noise of the tomato in a paragraph written in first person. This placed the author of the text inside the story; however, as a twist in the exercise each group had to switch the point of view and the context of the story. In my group, we changed it to second person, which I believe is the hardest point of view to perform or write, in order to make the activity challenging. We also took the original text and adapted it to be performed in the context of a high school basketball star who described the girls using the same adjectives the original author used for the tomato.

In this hilarious (at least to me it was) adaptation, I experienced the inception of an original text to an adapted story. This lesson in performance was enlightening in how performance artists take a seemingly unrelated text and adapt it into something that it was not originally meant to be. The manner in which this adaptation was performed was another exercise in performance studies. With directions from Dr. Taylor, the performers should use as much space as possible and in a way that traditional readers theater performs. As a group of four, the three ladies sat in a half circle facing the audience, and I, the high school basketball star, walked around the space like I owned the place. I think that the distance between the performers maintained the audiences attention.

One unexpected event that happened during the performance, was when I started laughing. I didn't think that the way the text was being performed was particularly funny, but I started laughing anyways. This put an odd position on the other performers, because they didn't understand why I was laughing. This unexpected occurrence during the performance taught me to be more professional when performing and not to let down the other members of the group. In order to stop this from happening again, I would suggest that the performer needs to memorize his/her lines and also take the performance seriously.