Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and With Communities

The first radio broadcast of a president's inaugural address was on March 4, 1925, when Calvin Coolidge was sworn in for his second presidential term. To acknowledge the centenary of this broadcasting milestone, NYU's Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL) will explore how audiences perceive the inaugural addresses of US presidents when the words of the addresses are anonymized and presented as scored transcripts that reflect the speech cadence used by the presidents during their speech delivery. The workshop will use the 100-year history of broadcasted inaugural addresses to explore how identity impacts how an audience receives a president's message. VPL has experimented with a warm-up activity of sharing an anonymized scored excerpt of an inaugural address, asking participants to read it, and then sharing who they think was speaking. This workshop will expand upon that short activity and offer scored transcripts from multiple inaugural speeches from across the last 100 years for participants' consideration. Participants will interact with the anonymized transcripts in various ways, including selecting ones that resonate with them the most and then experimenting with speaking the text aloud. Participants will also explore how embodying the speeches using the scoring of the original speaker impacts their perceptions of the speech, its meaning, and its impact. The workshop will culminate in a reveal of each of the original speakers of the excerpts, followed by a discussion about initial perceptions from reading, discoveries from speaking aloud, and realizations once the actual identities of the presidents have been revealed.