Creation and Presentation

I have learned a lot in English and History class though my sophomore year in high school. I feel like no matter what project we did, we had to create something and then present it.  I know this seems like something very vague, but in class we covered every part of every aspect of creation and presentation.

In class we read the book Night by Ellie Wiesel. This was a true story about the holocaust. One of the assignments that were assigned to us was to create a piece of art relating to the book. I made a song list and designed a CD cover. This really helped me learn how to put things together and come up with connections between the book and music, something that I like a lot. I also had to use Photoshop to create the cover. When I was choosing songs, there was a lot of thought going into it because I didn’t know if I wanted to pick songs just for their titles, or what the actual song is about. I decided to do a little of both, and other songs work for both. I think the best choice I made is This Place is a Prison by The Postal Service. The title of it is pretty obvious, and it has some pretty deep lyrics too. It was easy to make a connection with this song. Another song I chose is Stress by Justice. This song is instrumental, so there aren’t any lyrics to relate the book to, but how the song makes you feel anxious. So instead of words and ideas, I am connecting emotions from a song to the book.

We met up with Leah Stein to create a site-specific work. First we watched an example of one of her dances at the Eastern State Penitentiary. Then our job was to go out into the city and pick our own site and explore it then work together to create our own site-specific dance. There weren’t really any requirements besides being site-specific. In simple terms, that means that the dance has to be performed in that specific spot or it wouldn’t look right. In our performance we ran on smooth ground and stumbled on rough ground. People walk past this spot all the time, and many people gave us weird looks while we were practicing. One of the points of this project was to get people to notice the site in a way they never saw it before. If you just walk past the spot, you might look at it and think that it’s just a small abandoned section of gravel. But when we were presenting there, everyone was really paying attention to the different textures of the ground and the noises that feet make as they scurry across the ground or the different size rocks being banged against a piece of wood.

Another thing that we did was to create a museum proposal about colonialism by picking a country and focusing on that countries colonialism. We had to present this proposal to a small section of the class and we all voted on who had the best project. My country was Australia had a pretty peaceful colonization, so in my presentation I made sure to show why that was important. Before Colonization: “Aboriginal harmony with the land kept environmental deterioration to a minimum. Their ancient traditions involved a close spiritual bond between every living thing and even inanimate objects such as rocks and rivers.” After Colonization: “Australians are trying to get back to their Aborigines roots and become friendly with the earth” I also included this poem by Robert Frost called Nothing Gold Can Stay. After we all presented in small groups, the best few presentations were going to be shown to the whole class. My presentation wasn’t picked, but I felt like this project really helped my improve my presentation skills.

Overall, these are the two main points that I can take away from my classes this year. The thought I put into creating things has most definitely improved. I’m not just throwing random things together to get a good grade. There is always reason into what I create. I also know that I have made an improvement in my presentations. I know that it’s always important to rehearse and decide ahead of time what I’m going to say or do, because I’ll be less nervous and sound smarter because my presentation will have a nice flow.