#I made this a while back for an interfaith art show that I never ended up submtting due to some technical issues

[rose-iconography]

The Good Samaritan

The parable of the Good Samaritan is more than just a story about the importance of goodness. It is fundamentally is about the goodness of people outside one’s own ethnic, religious, and racial group. It is a parable that is still relevent today. 

I have spent a lot of my time with Muslims over the years, and I have been profoundly impressed by their hospitality towards the stranger and dedication to helping the poor. I dedicate this piece to the Muslims I have worked with over the years and have grown to deeply love. 

[alexoncameraondance]

Conceptual Development of Project One

When I saw the first project prompt, it was open-ended enough that I was interested to see where I could take it conceptually. The contrast of motion and stillness is fairly straightforward, and while it gave me a parameter to work within, it wasn’t a strong source of inspiration for me. During winter break, before the class started, I was reminded of the webcam mounted on the Interfaith Chapel pointing towards Rush Rhees Library. I wasn’t sure how, but I was obsessed with the idea of incorporating that camera into my piece somehow.

Opportunity wasn’t even my first idea for the piece. The piece that I initially wanted to do never had a title, but it was going to focus on the racial inequality of incarceration due to marijuana-based offenses even in places where recreational use has been legalized. The plan was to shift between three components. The first would be color-desaturated still photographs flicking at a rate that would simulate stuttering vision showing police handcuffing Black people while white people in suits turn a profit. The second, hazy, dream-like imagery meant to invoke a feeling of intoxication. The last major component would be two dancers dancing out the unequal racial relationship, eventually leading to Black triumph over inequality. Unfortunately, the other dancer that I had lined up to perform for the video backed out at the last second, causing the entire planning process to collapse less than a week before the deadline. I put some of these filming ideas on the backburner, and now they’re finding new life in my final project of the semester.

It was at this time that I asked for an extension on the project, running low on both time and creative energy. In my mind, I still wanted this piece to be extravagant and complex, showing the full range of my abilities as a director, actor, and dancer. When my request was denied, I knew that the only way I would be able to have enough work to show in time would be to take a step back and simplify my goals. Instead of going for a “wow” factor with a high level of complexity right out of the gate, I would instead use my roots in performance art to create something moving in its simplicity. 

As I often do, I drew inspiration from my most immediate hardships. While in retrospect I agree that denying the request was the best course of action for the class as a whole, in the moment I was overwhelmed, anxious, and pushed almost to the point of breaking down entirely. I considered sending another email to beg and plead for an extension, but this is when I started reflecting on the nature of how I need to communicate to my professors in order to feel as though my mental health is being taken seriously. There’s always a confessional element to these emails, and they are generally fairly carefully planned. Not in the sense that they’re deceptive, quite the opposite; these emails need to communicate in words the intensity of the feelings that are inspiring them. In order for mental illness to be taken seriously in academia writ large, more and better words are needed than “I can’t, I’m too depressed”. Meanwhile, the prospect of graduation seemed at once so close as to be palpable and so difficult and painful as to make me question its worth. When I reflect on my academic career at the University, can I honestly say that it was a good choice? I have met incredible people here and made great connections with students and faculty alike, but there are great people at every college if you can find them. Would I really have been so much worse off at a state school? Was the lure of academic prestige and the ephemeral promise of a shining future worth going tens of thousands of dollars into debt and pushing myself to the brink of suicide one semester after another?

It was this combination-- the shining future of graduation after a long and difficult journey of traversing academia and the rhetoric I use to communicate the severity of my illness in a way that’s legible for academia-- that birthed Opportunity. In the next post, I’ll be talking about the execution of these ideas and my reflections on the piece.