THE VOICE AND SPEECH PARODIES [SPEECH FOR THE STAGE FALL 2012 SHOWCASE]

Under the direction of Professor Rebekah Maggor

Production Credits

About the "Parodies"

Have you ever wondered, "What the heck do students learn in Voice and Speech class?" or "What are all those weird noises coming from Bunce 159?" The Department of Theatre and Dance's illustrious Voice and Speech students will now answer all of these burning questions and more at...

The 2012 Voice and Speech Parodies!

Tuesday, December 18
First Section: 11:00am-12:00pm (9:25 class)
Second Section: 3:30pm-4:30pm (12:15 class)
Place: Bunce 159

Students will perform devised works demonstrating their intellectual and technical mastery of the material they learned this semester.

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"Final Assignment: The Voice and Speech Class Parodies"
Cultural historian Lawrence Levine argues in his book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, that the numerous parodies of Shakespeare's plays performed in the United States during the nineteenth century arose from the American people's intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's work. They were able to make fun of his plays because they knew them inside and out. After all, how could anyone not familiar with the stories, characters, and poetry of Shakespeare's plays make jokes about them?

Similarly, Melanie Stewart's production of Kill Me Now makes fun of televised dance competitions. An immense amount of research on dance competitions, dance styles, and reality television went into creating this piece. It is this detailed and profound knowledge of these forms that makes this show such an intelligent (and hysterically funny) parody of dance competitions.

Keeping in mind this idea that an intelligent parody of a topic demands an intimate knowledge of that topic, the final performance will be a parody of voice class. Through this parody students will prove their intellectual and technical mastery of the material they learned in this course.

Each group of 4 students will have 20 minutes to perform its parody.