Usha Singh
Dance 102
December 18, 2014
Professor Patricia Hoffbauer
Final Paper (Body as Culture)
For my final performance, I mainly focused on the first unit of the semester which was body as culture. My collaborators and I wanted to prospect our focus on how filmmakers produce pieces of work that aren’t purely objectified or fully honest. Our performance was based on women empowerment and how a filmmaker would make it into an objectified subject and not interpret it to the world as it is because they want to convey the factual information in another way to the public.
The subject matter of our performance ties in with our first unit of body as culture. Based on Jay Ruby’s essay “The Ethics of Image Making,” he states “the time when a reporter could rely on the principle that the public’s right to know is more important than the individual’s right to privacy, and a journalist’s primary ethical responsibility was to be objective, fair and honest is over.” When Ruby says this he is demonstrating our purpose of our final performance. Our performance conveyed the idea that images produced or documented are plain acts and are only utilized if they encourage the idea that is a norm to the public in a positive way.
The performance we displayed exemplifies that producers are more prone to conveying the message that they would want their viewers to see rather than having them see it as it without any interference or biased judgements, especially in a documentary, like in our case. According to Jay Ruby, he says “We are beginning to understand the technologically produced image as a

construction.” In other words, he means we now view films or any other technologically produced pieces as an informative act of someone who has a culture, beliefs and a conscious point of view which causes the images produced to be a conveyed as a certain kind of knowledge in a particular way. In our performance the documentor, tries to portray an idea of what women empowerment and feminism is during an interview to two completely different women. One portrays the epitome of what an empowered woman should