On New York University Week: Think you can match inaugural address quotes to the presidents who spoke them? Think again.
Joe Salvatore, clinical professor and director of educational theatre, says it may be harder than you think.
Faculty Bio:
Joe Salvatore is a Clinical Professor and Director of Educational Theatre at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where he teaches courses in ethnodrama, verbatim performance, community-engaged theatre, and new play development, and co-leads the MA in Theatre for Social and Civic Engagement. He also serves as the Vice Chair for Academic Affairs for the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions.
In 2017, Joe founded the Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL), which, under his direction, has created over 30 video and live performance projects exploring a range of political, cultural, and social topics and facilitated outreach and education programs throughout the United States. Current projects include an international research collaboration examining how interview-based verbatim performance interventions can disrupt discrimination in healthcare delivery; an ethnodrama exploring the impact of clergy sexual abuse on survivors’ spirituality and health; and an interview project examining perceptions of migration in the United States. Joe is the author of Creating Ethnodrama: A Theatrical Approach to Research (Guilford Press)..
Transcript:
In the Verbatim Performance Lab, we ask actors to replicate the exact speech and gestural patterns of individuals in an original recording, such as a political speech or a public hearing, to investigate how the speaker’s gender, race and ethnicity might contribute to what a listener hears.
Our most recent experiment, The Inauguration Project, focused on how audiences engage with a president’s inauguration speech when the president’s identity is unknown. We took excerpts from five inaugurals since 1969 and had actors who are different-bodied than the presidents who delivered them perform them verbatim for an audience. We then invited the audience to guess which president was speaking. We conducted this performance experiment in New York City, Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas, with slight variations each time. One theme emerged: the decoupling of the president’s identity from the speech allowed the audience to hear the similarities between the presidents and their messages rather than their partisan differences.
One young woman remarked, with surprise, that she would have voted for Ronald Reagan based on a passage from his second inaugural address delivered by a young Black woman. When another audience heard the same excerpt performed by a mixed-race woman, 34% believed it was Joe Biden’s address. An excerpt from Bill Clinton’s second inaugural, delivered by a white woman, was attributed to George W. Bush by 42% of another audience. One audience member was slightly irritated at the similarities exposed by the anonymity, saying she listened to the speeches differently because they lacked the personalities behind them, which was precisely the point of the experiment.
When an audience hears an inaugural address in someone else’s voice and body, it prompts them to question why they perceive things the way they do. This critical engagement makes verbatim performance a powerful tool for understanding that *how* a message is delivered can be just as important as the message itself.
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