Friday, February 17, 2:00pm-3:00pm
Description: Anna Deavere Smith has spent more than four decades listening to and performing the voices of the nation—often in relation to race and racism—as part of her project, “On the Road: A Search for the American Character.” What lessons have emerged from these decades of listening? What discoveries have come from embodying our national character? And as we strive to have conversations about race and racism that are brave, empathetic, and productive, what might we learn from Smith’s work of listening, embodying, and performing?
Moderator:
This event is open to Emerson Students Only, with Limited Capacity. Pre-Registration is required: https://forms.gle/mZHpKxDTW3s5rvKv8
Spark Prompts are a tool to generate curiosity and interest in this year's Teach-In on Race sessions. The presenters have generated the following prompts as a way to spark dialogue while also inviting attendees to deepen their learning by reflecting on the sessions themselves.
Spark Prompt(s)
In this 5 minute video, Anna Deavere Smith shares one of the voices from her play "Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education." The play is about the school to prison pipeline and, as she does with all of her shows, she interviewed hundreds of people with different perspectives on and relationships to the issue and then in the show itself she performs some of those voices verbatim. Her work merges journalism, ethnography, and theater in an effort to investigate and further our understanding of U.S. society.
A big question raised by her work is about medium; why theater? How might theater help or hinder such a project? How, for example, might the impact of watching Smith perform an array of voices (representing multiple races, genders, perspectives, etc) be different from the impact of, for example, watching video of each person in a documentary film or reading transcripts of her interviews in a newspaper or book?
What are the powers and pitfalls of Smith’s overall project of, as she describes it, listening to and embodying diverse people in an effort to research and reveal our “national character(s)?” In this clip, for example, she is performing someone who is quite different from her. Does that help us hear, understand, or empathize in a new way? Or does it distract or raise concerns? How does her work affect the way we listen and engage?
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