The Art of Performance

 

Literature is often read, not performed. However this week in AP Language, we turned Chapter 7 of The Great Gatsby into a skit. Seeing the characters act out the scenes instead of reading words on a page transformed the story for me. Suddenly, Gatsby's desperation for Daisy wasn't just print on a page - it was shaking in someone's voice, or expressions that paint the picture of the scene. You see, acting is like p;ainting emotions, the same way an artist uses colors and textures to show sentiment within their artoworks. Would The Scream be the same without it's unique artstyle and brushstrokes? Definitely not. The same way you can emphasize different parts of a painting with different colors and heavinesses, we can emphasize different scenes of a book through acting. 

i think what stood out the most to me was how each group portrayed the same scenes in different ways. For example, our group was... well very unserious to say the least. We used modern slang and made our skit look like The Great Gatsby if it was from the hood. Other groups however, used different types of humor, like Sara's group, where they constantly roasted and made fun of each other in the Tom vs Gatsby scene. But this aspect of different portrayals of the same scenes is what makes acting an art. Every person inaterprets emotions differently, just like artists can interperet the same subject with different colors and mediums. Through these performances, I realized that literature could only do so much to convey emotions and tensions. That's the art of performance: the ability to bring words to life.

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