Evaluation and feedbacks of the poem performance

In this poem performance project, I saw truly felt the sentence “poem is like a song.” Our group added beats and melody to the performance. Each of us chose several sentences and improvised them. We then combianed our parts together as the final production. For me, this was very interesting. I got the chance to pick out the lines that I like and add melody to it based on the beats that we decided to use. It was short process, and it actually amazed me of how quick the simple but pretty melodies can be created. Also, because I want to find the lines that rhymes with each other, I actually took a closer look at the poem and the languages used in it. I also found out that there are lines in different stanzas with the same stress patterns and they do rhythm with each other. These new findings encouraged me to look at poems the different way than I did before. I want to look at each of them as a song. I want to feel the tone of the poem and create my own music out of it.

The strength of our group is that the way we performed it was very different from the rest of the groups. We didn’t go through the whole peom. Instead, we each picked our lines and used our creativity to make it the style we want it to be. For example, Jamaal took a few sentence out of the poem and expended on that. He read these sentences first and then added in some lines that he wrote in order to express his idea about the poem. The weakness of our performance was that some of us were not loud enough during the performance and that made the exciting performance seems a bit boring. Also, we lacked interactions. Even though the scheduling of our performance allowed us to show the understanding of the poem of each of us, we didn’t leave enough time to create a connection among the group members. It would be so much better if we had thought about what the rest of the group can do when a member is performing his/her part.

The performance of Aaron’s group was interesting. The way they walk in a circle represents the daily routine of the day. This routine was preety noticeable in the poem as well. However, the poem was too long. Even though the circling motions seemed fresh in the beginning, it become less amusing after the process goes on for a while. The performance of Grace’s group was very nice. I really like the music that they used when reading the poem. It made the performance seem very peaceful. They also had the group members come together in the end to read together, which showed the team connection of the group members. The performance of Stella’s group had the three group members read different sections of the poem. In that way, every group member got the equal part and presented in equal period of time. However, the lack of variation was also their weakness. The performance of Helen’s group was very vivid. They added body movements into the performance. I really liked those body movements. They also switched the readers and the performers around so that all the group members get the chance to perform and read. It would be better if they can speak louder on stage. The performance of Lesly’s group had body movements as well. However, they performed the poem in a different way than Helen’s group did. They had two people from different cultural background performing the poem on the opposite side of the stage as the reader reads the poem of the bridge. When needed, they had the actors reacted to the context of the poem. For example, when reading of the yellow bug, one of the actors screamed a little in response to the line.  It was fun to watch and easy to follow. Lastly, it would be better if the actors can have more interactions.

I really enjoyed the process of preparing and performing the poem. It leads me to the new possibility of those poems-I can treat them the same way I did for music pieces. After noticing such a possibility the poems seems even more attractive to me.