The Book of us project
Initial Purpose... Every one of us was assigned to write a non-fiction piece about something that matters to us. Above is a link to the field guide our team was given in the beginning of this project to introduce us to what we will be doing for second semester. |
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- This project wasn't about just writing a piece of creative writing. It was about developing our writing skills. So when it comes time to write new paces later in life we have these useful tools and ideas to work off of. The Mentor Text Graphic Organizer is where we took a piece of text that was the same writing purpose as ours and looked at different features of the text and incorporated it into our own writing piece
Dance is life
- The smell of hairspray and makeup congest the air. Struggling to get past all of the hair buns to get a quick glance in the mirror at my appearance to make sure everything is in place. because let me just tell you: you DO NOT want to be yelled at for one fly away or imperfect lipstick right before you go on stage. As time is ticking and I can hear the quiet roar of the audience filling the space, the nerves begin to take over my body. 1-Step, 2-Ball Change, 3-Crossover, 4-Step, 5-Ball change, 6-prep, 7-turn, 8-turn. as I go over the choreography, afraid that i’ll forget on stage, and I begin to go over it over and over again, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Wondering as to why I’m so nervous if I've been dancing ever since I was about 2 years old . Adjusting the scratchy, outrageous, but cute costume never felt so good.
The daunting walk from the dressing room to the side wings of the stage couldn't be anymore exciting as my eyes scan over the sea of family and friends. At this point, this is where i am’m are trying to keep the pee in and shaking off the nerves. Lights go down and we lightly shuffle across our stage. Ready, In position, 5,6,7,8. Lights come up. Its show time. During this time is when it all really goes to a blur. I pour my heart out onto that stage and feel the music dancing through me. Everything around me seems to disappear; its just me on that stage, all by myself. Now lets be honest here, most dancers want to be the one to stand out, so we literally have to dance like no ones watching. Not thinking is the beauty of it. I have to trust myself that I know it like the back of my hand. Nothing is more rewarding than hearing my mom chant my name from the crowd. Who would have ever thought in that moment, as sweat drips and my body buzzes with adrenaline that I've never felt so beautiful. I hit the ending pose and the hot lights go back down to rest. I can’t help but smile in this moment. Reminiscing on how far I've come, it’s when everything seems to be worth it, the stress, dedication, and effort you put into that piece of art is when it all becomes worth it.
You wouldn't really think that something that you were put into without much a choice would be something that you define yourself as. I am a dancer.
This is a link to my FINAL PRODUCT called Dance with Your Heart and Your Body Will Follow
As the photographer I took head shots of the entire team and we added all of our favorite quotes to the photos and hung them beautifully around the classroom.
- AFTER THE FINAL EXHIBITION: PROJECT REFLECTION
- As easy as it sounds to write about something we are all passionate about, we actually took a lot of steps in order to insure we created a well thought out piece of writing for the final product. I was excited for this opportunity to be creative with our piece of writing since we haven’t really been able to do so this year. We all began by doing Dr.P’s activity “1 topic = 18 topics.” I already knew what I wanted to write about. Dance! For the most part during this project, I was putting a lot of effort into all of the assignments. Reflecting is something I like doing believe it or not, and we did a lot of that with all of the outlines we were doing for mentor texts. I breezed through the down draft at first, I just decided to write was it looked and felt like before and during a performance. I was pretty happy with what I wrote. But when we started getting peer critique, I noticed that my story really didn’t have much substance to it. I realized this when most of my critiques were to add personal experience. That is when I noticed that this story doesn't really show my journey through dance and how hard i’ve worked to become the dancer I am today. But then again I had a really hard time revising that critique. I didn’t think my memories of specific instances really fit into my writing. From there I just kept asking my classmates what type of experiences to add. I’m a perfectionist and I won’t add anything to my story unless I am really happy with it. So I just decided to rewrite the whole thing during the last minute. For me, I ALWAYS want to get my work done as soon as possible because I am a stress ball and i’ll be worried about it until it’s finished and turned in. I was sitting at home typing, then deleting everything, then typing something else, then deleting it. After starting at a blank screen I would then just re-type what I had in the first place. It was really frustrating because I was having a writers block and I couldn’t think of anything I actually liked. I was starting to give up. I called up a friend asked for help, but of course since I’m pretty stubborn and I won’t start typing until I know where I’m going with my story and It made me more frustrated. I just added my two new paragraphs to my downdraft and called it a night. I was fine with it. Fine isn’t good enough for me but I had the mentality that it couldn’t get any better. Then Dr.P came and talked to me about how he thought that the way I originally started it in my downdraft was a lot stronger of an introduction. So I went back in and intertwined the two new paragraphs I wrote about my background in dance into my piece and that simple changed transformed my whole piece and I liked it 100 times better. I love being proud of my work and thats exactly what I felt.
For exhibition prep, I signed up for photographer because I wanted our team to have nice pictures for them to put on their DPs. One of my tasks was to take headshots of the entire team,They came out very professional and beautiful. Dr.P made a comment about how the headshots could fit right in a magazine is when I realized that the photos totally made the room exhibition ready. Project work time mostly consisted of floating around the classrooms taking pictures of people working. During work time I was asked if I could read my piece on exhibition night and I didn’t really mind so I just said yeah. When I was sitting in the line to practice reading our piece in front of an audience, is when I started to regret signing up. Nerves and what if thoughts were getting to me, but that wasn’t a good enough reason for me to quit. It was all just anxiety because I went up and read without messing up and I enjoyed sharing my piece. So I’m happy that I read the night of because I probably would have regretted it if I didn’t. Exhibition went as planned and I heard we sold a good amount of books. All went well and I don’t really have anything negative to say about how we did because we all pulled through and made it a great night.