Live Performance: Oral Interpretation Festival
On Sunday, January 10, Center Stage got back into the live performance business! We will admit that we were all going a little stir-crazy without a live performance in almost a year, since competition last March. This was a long, hard slog for a school that is used to doing a couple dozen live performances a year.
So why start with an Oral Interpretation Festival, and more importantly, what the heck is Oral Interpretation? Oral Interpretation is an artistic discipline that is not exactly acting, but is sort of acting-adjacent. Charlotte Lee, who is the Grandmother of Oral Interpretation in the United States, defines Oral Interpretation as, "the art of communicating to an audience a work of literary art in its intellectual, emotional, and esthetic entirety". It is a performer with a script in hand performing a piece of literature, usually either poetry or prose, in such a way that the audience not only hears the words and meaning of the piece, but also experiences the emotions, characters and atmosphere.
And why did we choose this to be our first live performance? Because we could do it safely. There were only 12 students involved, enrolled in Stephen Waldrup’s and Rebecca Servon’s Advanced Acting classes. We limited the number of spectators allowed and socially distanced their seating, and the performers only took off their masks when they went behind a Plexiglas screen to perform.
Each of the students chose a piece of prose and a program of poetry to perform. They wrote introductions to bring the audience into the material and then combined their feelings and experience with the words of the material to involve and move the audience. The material varied from T.S. Eliot to Maya Angelou, and from Louisa May Alcott to Aldous Huxley.
The students did a wonderful job. When they started this project in September, the concept of Oral Interpretation was as foreign to them as it is to most of you reading this now. They couldn’t understand how standing in front of people and reading a story could be a performance. As they worked on the material over the past few months though, we saw the material sink into their beings so that they were one with their material and sharing something with the audience that they felt deeply about.
We live-streamed the performances, and they are archived on our YouTube channel and on our Facebook page:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpvtXRq_FBc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPS76UgetYI
https://www.facebook.com/CenterStageNewJersey/videos/408267340388907
Final Round: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haFIWQkzW8M
It was a great afternoon. The students all enjoyed finally getting to perform again, the teachers were incredibly proud of their work, and the spectators were opened up to something new.
And we’re back, doing live performances in a changed world. There will be more coming, and we’ll figure out how to bring more live performance into a world sorely needing it. It will happen slowly, because we will only do it in such a way that we know is safe. But we need performance outlets, we need to express everything we’ve been feeling this past year.
We look forward to seeing you at future performances!