Writing Homework Help

Prompt: Planet Earth has been taken hostage by aliens. The aliens are small and yellow, and they communicate only through traditional song and dance. They believe that all of life should be performed, and since planet earth does not communicate exclusively through song and dance, they are contemplating an intervention to extinguish the human race and replace them with singing, dancing aliens. They have invited several members of society aboard their ship as informants at their meetings, in which they will discuss the fate of our planet. You are one of those informants.

It is your job to convince the aliens that humans are worth keeping around, and to let us go in peace. They have set aside time for you to speak at the next and final meeting, and you are now tasked with preparing your final statement to save us. To do this, you must convince the aliens by reflecting on performance on planet earth. Use the following questions to guide your thinking: what is performance? How it is enacted in our everyday lives? How have scholars understood performance in our lived experience? How might performance be used as a way of knowing, or as a form of activism?  Regardless of how you choose to reflect on performance, make sure your statement is compelling and thinks through performance in a variety of different ways.

Throughout this Performance course we have studied Performance of Self, Performance as Inquiry and Performance with Possibility, activism and hope for African Americans. The book we read was Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments.