Augusté and I paired up to do the Touch-Move exercise. It was an interesting experience I don’t remember isolating parts of my body in such a way before. Again, it was a challenge because the movement had to be initiated by the part of the body that was touched. Specifically, after Ondrej talked about how it is extremely difficult to isolate and make certain that only a singular part of the body is moving, I noticed how accommodating I was. For example, there was one time when Augusté touched my calf, so to move my calf, I moved my feet. Even though the result was my calf moving, the movement was not initiated there. To truly only move one part of the body requires immense concentration and awareness. Looking back at my movements, I definitely did not isolate each part of my body which I realize now because my movements were too big to be done solely by one body part. It is interesting, though, how we are so used to our bodies as a whole and not as singular parts. Also today I noticed this when I moved my foot, my entire leg would tense or move to make the movement in my foot possible. It was an experience I had never felt before because I had never thought about the interconnectedness of my body until I was forced to separate the parts. I had not expected it to be so difficult since I use my body every single day, for every single task, but, as I learned today, never a part in isolation.

I was not sure what exactly I wanted to use from the costume shop but I wanted it to portray how I see Medea. I thought of all the times I see women superheroes dressed in exposing clothing or dresses, which is extremely impractical when you are supposed to save the world. I thought about using a skirt or a dress but in my opinion, this would just seem irrational since Medea is ready to slay and not be slain. I tried to go against this expectation of flowiness and chose a pair of pants, sturdy shoes, and a simple white shirt. Medea in the morning mourning ready to slay conjured images of knights in full armor and sleepwalkers going to the fridge with messed up hair. I am not sure if I completely achieved this but I think my look is a start. I just want to use the costumes to create something unexpected but that still fits the category. Before this, I have never put a lot of emphasis on costumes because whenever I was in theater productions, costumes were the last thing to fall into place. There were fitting and all, but never a run through with costumes until a week prior to tech week. This is why I was surprised that Trajal worked with costumes from the beginning of the process because I had never been exposed to this way of working. When I came to my dorm and experimented with different combinations of costumes, I started to understand that this was actually research. I searched for the best possible option, often changing in and out of clothes and trying different ideas. I think this type of experimentation is valuable research because through questioning decisions like costumes, you get a better sense in which direction you want to take your piece. For me, my starting point was that I wanted Medea to wear pants but from there more ideas and through that more context around who my Medea would be was established.

What I enjoy about the seminar session is that we begin with discussing something similar to the reading but then we move into different subjects that are not directly related but are still influenced by the reading. It makes the class unpredictable because even if you have done the readings, the class will evolve as people join the conversation. This also happened today when we moved from the overarching idea of research to cultural appropriation. It was interesting to hear all the different opinions and stories people had. Using another culture as an aesthetic without knowing the significance of the object being used is misguided, specifically when people justify it as trying to understand the other culture without understanding the background. There have been many moments in my life when these situations made me uncomfortable and one of them was during Marhaba when tourists could try on “traditional” UAE clothing in the desert and take pictures. When we were speaking about the public getting frustrated by cultural appropriation, someone said that this is increased if the dominant party is gaining from this economically. But what if the minority that this clothing is coming from is earning money? Is this as bad, or even worse because they are “selling out”? Or are they not aware of cultural appropriation or even uncomfortable by having people without knowledge of the cultural significance wear it? I think this would have been an interesting point to discuss, but I do not think I can properly formulate my thoughts on this subject yet. I need to do more research about this topic to be able to discuss it more effectively.