at ease under trees

Paris' Persuasion and Timmy's Tumble

My topic being feminism, Christy's being childhood and Sarah's memory, we had to create characters representing our topics and create a situation in which they interacted. I chose Paris Hilton because I feel she is the representative of a lifestyle of young girls that is growing in popularity. Though most people are understandably disgusted by her, it is funny how many growing girls are shaping themselves into something resembling Paris. She's a symbol of what is nowadays perceived as desirable and fun.

Our scene that we created out of our sculpted wax figures consisted of a child named Timmy being interrupted from his time of imagination by Paris Hilton. Timmy and Christy's octopus cowboy of Timmy's imagination are hanging from the ceiling, swinging and playing, with Raffe music playing. Paris enters, dragging along with her my piece from the previous project (the face with the makeup connected), and the music switches to one of her trashy songs. She lures Timmy out of his state of imagination, cutting him down from mid-air while managing to make a pass at the octopus... it was quite an experience acting as I thought Paris would. As Timmy falls he knocks down one of the children's pictures on the wall of his bedroom, and on the other side is a revealing picture of Paris. Paris departs with Timmy for a party, asking him if he can say, "that's hot."

I've never performed like that before, incorporating my art with puppets, music, acting and impersonation. It certainly helped to prepare me for the spectacle last Thursday. I was pleased with the reaction of my class, which was a lot of laughter. I feel like the plot was quite typical, but touches such as having Timmy and his imaginary friend floating around in the sky and getting cut down by Paris, and knocking down his picture revealed something beyond the surface interpretation.

We created a video from the footage of our performance. Christy, Sarah and I intermingled scenes from the performance with pictures of children's art and of Paris Hilton. We attempted to do so in a clever way, such as flashing to a picture of Paris mostly naked, wearing a cowboy hat after the imagainary octopus' declaration that "I'm a cowboy!" Timmy states, "I'm Timmy, and this is my imagination!" and we then insert a picture of Paris dressed very provocatively. I'd never made a video before, so it was such a foreign experience to me but I liked it, nevertheless.

posted by kristine @ 11:36 PM