Contact Information

Carole Bennett
G-107 Orchard Ridge Campus
Oakland Community College
27055 Orchard Lake Road
Farmington Hills, MI 48334

Phone: 248.522.3692
Email:
cabennet@oaklandcc.edu
(email preferred)

Poetry, Play and Performance: Writing and Performing Your Stories

Friday & Saturday - Feb. 19 & 20, 2010

Oakland Community College - Orchard Ridge Campus

Oral interpretation is the art of communicating to an audience a work of literary art in its intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic entirety" (Lee, et al., 1997). It is the process whereby the presenter takes a piece of text, analyzes it, and presents it to an audience, keeping true to the author's intended tone. The goal is to evoke the images from the text and help the audience to experience the work.

Our Performance Studies Festival is a celebration of performance art, in all its forms. This type of festival is intended to expose students to quality literature, to help them better understand the human experience, and to assist them in responding to performance art. The day long event includes group and individual performances, workshops and seminars. The workshops are designed to be interactive and enjoyable. This is not a competitive event, and it is a wonderful learning opportunity. Group performances, contributed by visiting schools and typically running about 20 minutes, are staged in a presentational style often using no costumes or props. Students are also invited to bring an individual piece that runs from 2-4 minutes. They may write their own piece or select from one specific type of literature (prose, slam poetry or poetry, a play or screenplay) or they might decide to put together a program that includes two or more types of literature. Participants may also want to include some non-traditional texts like oral histories, published journals, radio excerpts, essays, and etc. Manuscripts are optional. The most important thing is to try to allow the audience to imagine and understand the literature as the author intended. Everyone should feel free to be creative! Students can come for all or part of the day.

Photos Credit: Michael Garcia, Garcia Design, magarcia@rcn.com