Presence: Voice, Speech, and Persona for Public Professionals
- Summer 2015
Additional Details:
Hardly a profession across the campus does not, at some point, meet the public. Whether this occurs in classrooms, boardrooms, or courtrooms, routinely or occasionally, they offer brief and valuable moments to present ideas, products, positions, and people. No idea, product, or argument can find a public without a spokesperson. Becoming a speaker of ideas is what this course offers. The School of Drama is uniquely qualified to train people for this. This course uses performance techniques of voice, movement, and presence, to develop greater authenticity for any speaker in any public forum. No one is better qualified than theatre practitioners, who work with exactly these tools artistically, and these same tools can be applied across a broader market to improve the presence of any public professional.
The course is designed for a broad population across the campus as well as within the host department. As its emphasis is on delivery not content, the techniques are available to students in the business school as well the as arts, in science and in marketing, to any student in any field whose ideas would find a wider audience with improved speaking and presentation skills . Making better speakers doesn’t make better science, or better products, but it does make science and products more accessible.
Learning Objectives:
This 4 credit course is designed to train students to:
• Demonstrate confidence as a public presence in the classroom and in public forums.
• Speak with authenticity about their content
• To overcome the challenges of cultural differences, or to learn to acknowledge them as a place of strength
• To define and make the most effective use of space, and of this I speak of moving with confidence as a body among other bodies as well as the space that both inhabit
• To develop an authentic voice for speaking from a place of knowledge and, more importantly, a place of passion and curiosity. • To negotiate technology as a ‘scene partner’, not as a substitute for presence
• Using video equipment to record teaching ‘demos’, the student would also profit from watching and critiquing their own presentation, as well as be able to take away the best of it as a digital speaking sample for use in their own portfolio.