Post-truth speechmaking
Dr Oliver Bray
Dean of School - Leeds School Of Arts
Biography
Oliver is the Director of Arts in the Leeds School of Arts and is well-respected for producing performance and live art work which seeks to always be genuinely innovative and edgy, while remaining unapologetically inclusive and watchable. His work has toured widely to various national and international festivals including; the Sibiu International Theatre festival in Romania, the In Between Time festival in Bristol and the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow.
His current research interests stem from his professional practice in contemporary performance and live art but are inherently interdisciplinary in nature, they include methodologies of restriction and constraint, speechmaking, and the art of rhetoric.
Synopsis
Speechmaking can be an extraordinarily powerful tool, but contemporary audiences have become wise to the proliferation of media-trained oratory – and speechmaking has been transformed into absurd noise. Dr Oliver Bray will demonstrate the performance of speechmaking in a post-truth era. He introduces how the historic importance of speaking well has changed over time and now elicits cynicism in audiences, a sea-change from the actionable to the abstract. He argues how the saturation of technically appealing but ultimately vacuous speechmaking has turned it into background noise and as a result, the performative and theatrical aspects of speechmaking are thrown into sharp relief.
The talk will include a short excerpt of Oliver’s performance ‘Ursonate Post-truth,’ a reworking of Kurt Schwitters’ seminal sound poem ‘The Ursonate’ which will observe the problems with language, trust and (post) truth in our changing world.
