Outline:

Introduction:

What my perspective of audience is

1st point:

Mom making me perform everywhere

2nd point:

Dance teacher making us dance everywhere

3rd point:

Doing the two-hour dance performance

Conclusion:

Being comfortable with yourself and with what you are doing matters most when performing

write out:

Hi everyone by this stage of the semester you all probably know what my name is but I will say it again it is Tharshana and I am going to talk about my experience of audience. Most of my audience experience mostly comes with performing. Growing up my mom thought it was a good idea to make me and my sister perform for everything. So we would always dance at cultural events or sing at them. If there was some kind of performance my mom would make us do something at it. And I actually have pictures. (Show picture). I think I was maybe 5 or 6 in this but this was at a cultural event and my mom dressed me up in a sari and gave me a baby doll and sang this lullaby. And in the movie the mom is signing it to an actual baby but we didn’t have one at that time so I couldn’t use one. When I was younger my mom would make me do all this stuff and I would just do it cause I was little and I didn’t care but now when I think about it  I realized how important it was to put yourself out there and get exposure to performing to different types of people. If it wasn’t for my mom, I probably wouldn’t be comfortable being so outspoken or performing anywhere. Also, I am a dancer. I have been dancing since I was four. I do Indian Classical Dancing called Bharatanatyam. My dance teacher also made us dance everywhere. Whenever there was an appropriate place to dance she would make us. I have danced at library demonstrations, temples, culture shows. And I realized the more you do something and the more you perform and do things in front of people the easier it is to perform in front of people and in the beginning we did gigs and like the lights were off and you couldn’t see peoples faces and that was fine with me cause its like you are dancing for yourself but then sometimes we did performances where there wasn’t lighting and you could see the peoples faces and you could tell if they liked it or not depending on their facial expressions or if they were even paying attention and that is really scary cause your critiques are critiquing you as you are performing but over time you get over it and I realized that I do this for myself and how it makes me feel. This summer actually I did a two-hour solo performance. This is called an arangetram. Oh I brought pictures. These are my two favorite ones. So it was just me on stage for two hours in front of 400 people. The thought of that even terrifies me now but during that time I wasn’t really thinking about that. You audience is there to cheer you on and obviously they are going to critique you it’s an art form but they are also going to applaud you for putting yourself out there. But during those two hours I didn’t even realize I was dancing in front of a crowd I felt like I was floating on clouds or something. It was really surreal experience and not until the end did I realize how many people there were and it was amazing. So in conclusion audience in my opinion is there to be there but form a performance stand point how you feel about yourself while you are on stage and how you feel doing what you are doing matters the most. Thank You

Reflection:

This speech was really personal for me. I was able to talk about basically my life because I have performed for the majority of my life and performing is a big part of who I am. It was really nice sharing it with the class. I think I could’ve done better in terms of presentation because I laughed at myself a lot and I don’t think I should’ve done that. But otherwise I think it was a solid presentation.