People, Positions, and Interpretations: Reactions to Composition Exercise 4/3/08

My eyes widened a little when Shanga said “two minutes”. We had about thirty seconds each to position our five fellows into an arrangement that would depict an important event in our life. Where to begin? The first thing I had to do was bridge the gap between that event, emotionally charged and life-changingly large in scope, with the present, full of strangers and dulled by routine. The second reconciliation was between the transformation caused by the event and the stillness of the pose. Okay, enough thinking, now move, place, snap into instinct – and time’s up!

Reactions to this exercise varied through the groups. There was much use of time progression, which involved having actors be snapshots through time. This was a notable and effective way of resolving the issue of change (innate in the depicted event) versus stasis (the depiction). Progression was easily seen when the actors posed along the line traveled by the Western eye, from left to right. Down to up or up to down depended on the brand of emotional change involved: a falling would end towards the ground whereas an uplifting would grow upwards. Two dimensions added a lot to visual impact, but even more striking was three dimensional use of stage space. What does it mean to be in the past or future, to be under the surface or superficial, to be in front or in back or in between?

During the exercise, representations of the individual revealed themselves. Emotions, complex as they are, could not really be shown through the expression of one actor. In my group, many people displayed multi-dimensional emotions by having each actor represent a part of the individual’s soul. The combination of happy, scared, blank, withdrawn, and confident embodied the total feeling needed to be expressed. Other creators had one actor play themselves, while other actors were positioned around the one. This common theme struck me as the interplay between individual and society. Society depends on its relationship to the individual, and this idea was manifested in our instinctive positioning.

The most important connection was between the audience and the creator. The audience can see a certain image as something interesting or can create a mental model of the creator’s intent. What is the story here? Emotion comes across more easily, found through a general positive or negative tone. However, the context is unknown, and the presentation is dependent on the audience’s imagination. As part of the audience, my basic instinct was to start digging for metaphors. Soon, that alternated between seeing the image as something that can stand on its own, without a context. Art has many applications and even more inspirations, but sometimes it is just a photograph, just some colored lines, just some people assembled into something bigger than each alone.