Process Paper

Chelsea Janette Smith 

The Scarlet Letter and Juno Project

Link to video http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11615626/DSCF4321.AVI

After reading the Scarlet Letter and watching Juno I decided to make my creative piece a dance. At first I was going to make a pregnant stomach out of paper maché, with a Scarlett A to represent how they looked at pregnancy both through the book and through the movie. But then I began to realize there was more to these stories than just portraying pregnancy as it was portrayed in this story. I then decided to look at the story as it changed over time and what it has become. 

By making a dance I was able to portray the time that has changed and how everybody was portrayed but in a more urban way. In the dance my partner (Loren Jenkins) and I decided to do a mix of 3 different songs. We choose to do Unfaithful by Rihanna, Daddy’s Little Girl by J. Cole and the last song was Save Me by Nicki Minaj. Through these three songs it shows how overtime there was something changing in between each stage in their life. Not only that but this also shows the relationships that has changed overtime and what they would have concluded to if this was done in our time and not back in the 18th century.

In the first song Unfaithful by Rihanna this is almost like the start of the book. The  song talks about how a women kept running to another man and wasn’t happy with the man she was with. It also talks about how she knew she was wrong and kept betraying his trust. This song related to the book because it starts off with Hester who we assume went to jail for adultery. 

Then the next song that is played is Daddy’s Little Girl by J.Cole. The reason this song was chosen was to represent Pearl but in a more urban way. The book states multiply times that she was a difficult child as well as she wanted to know who her father was. In this song its a rap representation of how the child would have been seen now. 

In the final song Save Me by Nicki MInaj this song was used as an ending for both the movie and the song. In this song she says she needs to be saved because she can feel herself giving up. In the movie Juno felt like she had no choice but to give up because she thought Vanessa was no longer going to go through with the adoption. So as soon as she wrote the letter to let Vanessa know Juno was still in it she was saved from that.

Through this project I think making a dance is a well representation of what I wanted to do through this project. It not only shows how creative we can be with such a hard text like the Scarlet Letter but it also shows how creative we can be and have more than just a project on paper. Another thing that our creative piece should be able to show is the movement we do and how this relates to one of the themes we decided to portray in our dance.