Cory Fife's Portfolio

For this year, I had the challenge to display emotion through projects that would be shown to peers, teachers, and others outside of our school. This wasn’t much of a problem earlier because most of the projects that we did was with others and we mainly present in front of our classes or professionals within a smaller area. One project that made the most difficulty for myself was the Monologue Project and it’s implication outside of the classroom.

       In the Monologue Project, we had to create a character from a selective country that was under or fighting against imperial rule and develop a monologue that showed their character being oppressed under their imperial rule, which depended on what country they selected. After making the script, we had to memorize and perform in front of our peers and teachers at a stage, which we were allowed to use outside of school. For the project, there was going to be a lot of emotion portrayed within our dialogue and it was going to be a challenge for me personally because as a person, I seem to be non-emotional when doing certain things and this was something I had to deal with. When dealing with this problem, I would always go back to my script for help. During the majority of this project, I went through different drafts of my script based off feedback on both the historical and illiterate sides to make it both accurate and flow smoothly.

       For my first drafts of my script, there was parts where emotion was involved and shown, but I didn’t know how to address these parts and it ended up making the script flow as a whole, which wasn’t feeling right to me because it was lacking a personal feeling. I haven’t done a project this frontward to a large audience for a while and it wasn’t going well for me, but I would just have to try and get it to what it was in the ending. To help refurbish my script, I received different perspectives of feedback from my language and history teacher and they both gave me excellent responses to what I should do so that the performance would be realistic and also accurate to what event it took place in. When making more changes to new drafts, I also made a change to help myself with what parts would have more of an emotional pull and what parts I can easily perform.

       When looking at the final adaptations of my script, there are parts where underlining and highlighting are present so I can identify parts where the most emotion would be shown, such as anger or sadness. To also help, I would look at video examples to see how others would show emotion and tried what they were to come up with my own way to do so. In addition, there was also a performer that came in several times to help everyone prepare for our performances, but what we learned were little lessons on keeping calm and staying focused, which wasn’t a big problem for me and thought of his practices as non-reliable to what I was trying to fix. When the time came, that practice and examining really did help my performance with identifying where I needed to show emotion while still keeping my performance realistic to what a real citizen would act or feel during their times. I felt proud of what came out during the full thing. I made accomplishments throughout the whole project and with new drafts, came new opportunities for a better performance.  The audience especially looked like they enjoyed my performance, which was one of the benefits of working hard to become better.