Can You Dance For The Mind?

Hello and welcome to my last action project of this unit. In rhetoric we have been working on persuading or getting people to believe in their message. We have worked on this in a lot of different ways like debates, stories and history, but today I am going to present to you rhetoric in an art form that I am passionate about. For my art form I chose to do a dance so that I could communicate mental illness through it.

Artist Statement

For my Rhetorical art I have chosen to create a dance. I chose to create a dance because I think it is important to express yourself through movement and not just through words. To me, movement shows a language that everyone speaks. Everyone understands body language. Everyone knows when someone is mad or happy. In this dance I am am expressing something that I am also really passionate about which is mental illness. There are too many people who battle mental illnesses everyday and they feel like they're at war with themselves. One part of them is saying let it go, but then another part is stuck and can’t move. Dance is a good way to express this because I can move my body in moves that will show the battle between a human and their thoughts. Words can only give you a 2D perception The song that I will be dancing to is called “In This Shirt”. I chose this song because it tells the story of a battle between a person and their thoughts. It tells a story about how this man needs this shirt to live, but really this shirt is trapping him and messing with his mind. 1It is a very powerful song and I think it has a message behind it that you really have to listen closely to understand. In my dance I have on a big shirt which represents mental illness and I represent a person suffering from mental illness. I will be fighting with this shirt throughout my dance and then I finally let it go. To be clear not everyone overcomes their mental illness and not everyone is able to deal with it either, but I wanted to make this a little bit happier by giving props to those who have overcome or dealt with their illness.

Now you may be wondering why mental illness is so important to me. Well let’s put it this way, there are so many deadly diseases like cancer, heart problems and diabetes that we have to worry about. Once you have these there not easily preventable and people who want to live and fight the disease can’t do that because it’s not an option. With mental disorders I think they can be controlled or stopped with the right treatment, but because it takes the right mind of someone to even recognize their problem, let alone try and fix it it seems harder for the person. Imagine if you had an eating disorder and every time you look at food all you see is calories and this makes you not want to eat. Your weight declines at a rapid rate because you aren’t feeding your body the fuel it needs. Your slowly dying and everyone around you is trying to help you, but because your mind can only see what it wants you think everything is fine and you continue to not eat until you die a slow and painful death. So please sit back and enjoy my rhetoric art of dance.

This action project has taught me a lot about myself and how my mind works. This action projects was one of my favorite action projects because I was able to show what I'm passionate about and hopefully I communicated that to my audience. This was also a hard action project because its not easy to rekindle on old bad memories.