At the student art exhibit, one piece that affected me were the paintings with words and pictures hanging. There were multiple exhibits of this particular one, so one of them was based on humanity. The portrait was when the group of survivors at the airport found another man and he said ¨I thought I was the only one.¨ The word humanity was crossed out, and there were many pictures hanging of what kids thought represented humanity being gone. This showed me in a cool way(art) how after the epidemic and there was a very small population left, most of humanity was destroyed. The pictures showed normal things, like cities, nature, people doing everyday activities. But the big word HUMANITY was crossed out showing all these things were gone after the flu hit. I think when the public saw this piece of art and many others enforcing similar ideas, they got a better understanding of how the flu epidemic affected the world in station eleven. They saw how people were affected mentally, and while some just went into depression of the world would never be good again, others tried their best to live their best life, and make the best out of things. Finally, our classes project was a tree with ornaments that each had a word written on the outside that represented something that would survive in the epidemic. On the inside there was a piece of broken glass with something written on the piece that wouldn't survive. This communicated the message that the things that survive are written on the outside with the background of the color and shine we used to make them. The things that were destroyed by the flu are shown because they are on a piece of broken glass.
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For the Big Read project, I attended the Shakespeare and Station Eleven Performance. It was on November 1 at 7pm, at the Dewitt Theater, Hope College. I chose to go to this event because I had never seen a Shakespeare performance before and I was interested to see what it was like. Also, last year in English class we read Romeo and Juliet, which was my first glance on Shakespeare. At this event, I found it hard to get a good understanding of what exactly was happening in the Shakespeare performances. The speaker talked about how the book was in a way, a tragedy because of the many many deaths, and struggles that the survivors had to face, emotionally and physically. This connects to Shakespeare in the way that all of Shakespeare plays are centralized from a big conflict that causes the characters a lot of sadness. Basically the whole story is always a tragedy. Also, Romeo and Juliet(by Shakespeare) is based around that Juliet was going to be forced to marry someone out of her will, and in Station Eleven, the stowaway Eleanor was going to be forced to marry the Prophet. This event affected me by showing me how dramatic Shakespeare is. This was my first viewing of a real Shakespeare production(not a movie), and although I didn't quite comprehend it very well, the parts I did understand were very dated back, and the characters were very emotional and full of sorrow. It showed me how times were different back when these plays were written versus modern day.
During the circle discussion about Station 11 during english class, one assertion I made is that if you had to pick a main character, it would be Kirsten. In the book, there are many characters that tell their story of when the world just about ended, but overall, everything is connected/linked back to Kirsten. To start, Kirsten knew Arthur, a big character, at a young age and was even a witness at his death. Along being connected to Arthur, she was also a girl who Arthur´s girlfriend at the time had to take care of during a play that Kirsten and Arthur both were in. Also, a paperweight was passed between multiple of the characters, and ended up with Kirsten. Also, she is a big part of the travelling symphony group that was the main thing talked about during the time during the epidemic. When many people were separated from the group, and then her, she was the one that figured out a way to escape from the Prophet and his little group. Besides Kirsten, many other people from the traveling symphony had been taken hostage by them. If it weren't for Kirsten figuring out how to escape and learned their intents, her and her friends wouldn´t have escaped without hurting something else. Also, Arthur´s ex husband who was writing station 11, gave Arthur 2 copies of her comic. Arthus gave one to his son, and the other to Kirsten. This is big because the comic Miranda wrote is based off the happenings in the actual book, and Kirsten had a copy of it. Leading on from this, Kirsten is the only character in the story who was still young when the epidemic started, and she survived. As said earlier, she was in the traveling symphony group. This supports her being a main character because this group was something really cool after the epidemic had hit. A lot of people were down and kind of lost, but this group did their best to bring joy to people and do what they love, because survival in insufficient, like Kirsten liked to say.
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