Blog 7: Showcase Reflection

Rebel Artists in a Rebel City Showcase flyer

Village Hall performers:(back, l-r) Blythe Sinclair, Katie Lawson-Gill, Abby Thompson, Gabi Piombo, Rachel Norling, and Tegan Stuart; (front, l-r) Ericka Lacsamana, Castro, and Franchesca Sablan

The showcase was an interesting experience for me. Having never done one before, I felt both nervous and excited in the days leading up to it.



With my project focusing on education, I wanted to use my background and passion for early childhood education (ECE) to address how it affects a community. However, through the process of creating my project I found myself adding in the experience of immigration and how both topics are in relationship with each other. My past four years working in the ECE field (and my classes as a child psychology major) have taught me how important the first five years of a child’s life are. Everything they experience and learn are laying the foundation for their futures. In these four years I have also seen the way ECE gets downplayed, and sometimes ignored. These experiences influenced me to build my project centered around the cues children may get from society, while also trying to offer some insight as to how these cues can be avoided.



Working to create my poem was a great experience. I learned that free writing is my new best friend and that nothing is perfect the first time around. As for what I learned about myself as an artist, well, that’s simple: I am one. In the months leading up to this trip, I felt anxiety around being called an artist. I never felt like I was worthy of that title, like just because my work was used as a coping mechanism and I never shared it with anybody it couldn’t be called art. The past three weeks changed that feeling. I found myself opening up, sharing parts of my soul that I never used to let anyone see. I found myself reaching for my phone before falling asleep because I thought of a line for a poem and didn’t want to forget it. I found myself as an artist and along the way I learned how use my strengths instead of focus on my weaknesses.



While there was no formal structure for dialogue within my piece, I did present many ideas and themes within my poem that I hope got people thinking or feeling something. I personally think that most dialogues start with some sort of emotion. When we feel something so strongly, our instinct as humans is to share it with others, to create a community.



My interaction with the audience came during intermission. For the most part, I had people telling me that they enjoyed my performance or that they related to something I said. I learned how impactful words can be to a community and how important a community is to an artist. I also learned that sometimes the smaller details over shadow the bigger picture. The specific encounter I am thinking of involves a man telling me that a line in my poem , “...and feed you a language that feels like gravel in your throat”, was interesting to him especially because none of the pieces in the showcase were performed in a different language. “It seems imperialistic” he said after asking me why there weren’t any pieces in other languages. While I cannot speak for my classmates and their pieces, I told him that English was the only language I know which seemed to make him angrier. At the time, I didn’t understand why this interaction made me so uncomfortable. However, now I realize that it is because I felt as though my intended message was not received and I was made to feel like I did something wrong because of a small portion of my piece rather than talk about what the overall message was.

Based off of the interaction mentioned above, I think that there was some curiosity towards my piece. I didn’t focus explicitly on education in the way that most of society sees it, instead I rooted myself in the lessons that we learn through experiences. In regards to the man I talked to, I think that he learned that people experience the world differently. As we ended our conversation, he continuously expressed disbelief that out of a group of 16 students not one person performed in a different language.



Through this process I have learned so many skills that enabled me to grow as an artist. I learned that my work is welcomed by a community and in turn have gained so much confidence in sharing my art in the future. I learned how to listen to and collaborate with a room full of artists, becoming adaptable and communicative in the process. Collaborating with my classmates was a fun experience. Having 11 out of 16 people being willing to share pictures from their childhood made me feel a sense of joy and community as well as a level of trust and vulnerability. I feel like it added a level of authenticity to the piece that helped us all relate to it.



If I were able to change something about my project it would probably be sitting with the words longer. I’m the type of artist that often uses the first draft as a final product, scared of changing my original intended message or deviating from my train of thought. I think it would be helpful for me to go back over the words I wrote and see if there is a better way to present my message. I was positively surprised by how organic this process was for me. Once I had the first line written down, the rest of the poem just flowed out of me- I have never written something that I was satisfied with so fast.



#janterm180cork #showcase #rebelartists #inarebelcity #ididitmom!