My performanceart sketch for a college assignment along with a description of my idea.<3
Description:
Theme: Body Ideals
The Piece: The performance takes place in a store window on a shopping street in a city center — a place where ideals, consumerism, and self-image often blend together. In the window stands the performer, posing like a mannequin. She wears neutral clothing that still reveals her body shape, while posters displaying various body ideals, quotes, and the demands society places on women hang in the window in front of her. Her feet and legs slowly begin to fade away, symbolizing how her identity is disappearing as she tries to conform to all the ideals.
It is set on a shopping street so that people passing by can see her. They could stop and stare — but they don’t. Why? Because they don’t actually care about her appearance as much as she thinks they do. The pressure to fit in makes us believe that everyone notices every little detail we dislike about ourselves, which simply isn’t true. Most people are busy with their own lives and problems. It’s not worth stressing over. The world keeps moving, often without noticing every individual’s insecurities. (The shadows represent the audience. They are blurry and have a low opacity to show that they pass by without noticing her — and ultimately, that they don’t matter, their opinions don’t matter whatsoever.)
The performance itself becomes a kind of experiment: how many people will actually take the time to stop and look at her?
The store where the performance takes place is called “Allodoxa”, a reference to Allodoxaphobia — the fear of other people’s opinions. I also named the street that the store is on “BDD”, referring to Body Dysmorphic Disorder (commonly known as Body Dysmorphia), which is when someone becomes obsessively preoccupied with parts of their appearance that they perceive as “wrong.”
What I want to highlight with this piece is: “How much are we controlled by ideals that others don’t even notice?” Many people suffer in silence, afraid of not fitting in. The struggle with body ideals is often an internal battle — one the outside world doesn’t see.
Hopefully, that will change in the future. C: