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Kimberly Parker, The Scarlet Letter/Juno Mini Project Reflection

Posted by Kimberly Parker in Sexuality and Society in Literature - Dunn on
​Kimberly Parker
Self Reflection
For this second quarter project mini project, it was our jobs to show theme or themes demonstrated in both the book ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and the film ‘Juno’. After giving some thought about what themes I wanted to reflect, my partner Rebecca and I decided we wanted to show the themes of showing ones true self and being who you are even if it is not accepted by society. We chose to show these themes by choreographing a unique dance. 
For our dance, we chose the song ‘Raise your Weapon’ by Deadmau5. We chose this song because the lyrics talk about about a lost love. The lyrics also have a message that relates to what we have been talking about in class. An example of the lyrics are, “Raise your weapon, raise your weapon, one word and it's over. Rippin' through like a missile, rippin' through my heart, rob me of this love.” Figuratively speaking, the singer asks for someone to raise their weapon at her and launch an assault. This assault hurts her heart, and this is where our themes come in because these meanings have connections to both ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and ‘Juno’. 
In the dance, Rebecca starts out as a ballerina. Her playing a part of a ballerina represents the “normal” in society because she is gracefully dancing. My part was to represent society. While Rebecca starts to dance, my part was to constantly critique her ballet. I followed her around, lifting her arms or legs higher as she moved, told her slower, or to go faster. Me representing society shows that even though Rebecca is being “normal” it still is not good enough. About half way through the dance she runs away and slips into her tap shoes. The tap shoes were incorporated into our dance to represent ones true self. Tap shoes are loud, clanky and black, representing something different society is not used to. Rebecca runs back and preforms a fast pace tap dance and I’m standing there looking appalled, telling her that this is all wrong. As I am representing society, society fears the other. Rebecca dancing in her tap shoes showed Rebecca’s true self and what she really truly wanted to do. After I yelled at her and told her it was wrong, Rebecca collapsed to the floor and rolled over, dying. This represented her giving up because she knew she could not win and society was not going to accept her. This was the conclusion to our dance. 
Coming up with this dance was the fun part. Rebecca takes dance lessons, so as soon as she heard the song, she knew exactly how to dance. It was interesting coming up with ideas on how to incorporate society into our dance, but finally, we thought of the perfect idea and we felt like it worked out well. We didn’t really come across any problems or complications while creating the dance. I believe we did well on the creativity and representation aspect of this project. I feel like everything flowed together really nicely and made sense. In order to have made this project even better, I suppose we could have expanded the choreography and practiced even more than we did. Practicing more would have made the performance more polished. If I could do this whole project over again, I would have defiantly practiced more and would have added more dancing. Overall, I am pleased with the way this creative project turned out, I am glad we were able to demonstrate the themes we selected.