Transcript Communicating With an Audience

What is Interpretation?
Bowen, Chapter One
Three Important Ideas!
We Communicate through Visible
and Audible Behavior
Concrete Imagery as a Basis for
Selecting Behaviors
Performance is an Interaction
between Audience and
Performer
Definition Develops the Three
The Simplest Definition: "Reading Aloud."
Bowen's First: "the oral communication of
ideas and feelings from the printed page
to an audience, so the audience will
understand the ideas and experience the
feelings."
Simple Communication?
But Define Those Ideas and Feelings,
Where They Originate.
We Communicate Audibly and Visibly.
But Ideas and Feelings Exist Inside Human
Beings.
So We must Develop Interior Ideas,
Feelings and Experiences Based on
Imagination
So We Imagine The
Literature
As interpreters, we try to validate our
experiences within the literature.
We aim for a reasonable interpretation
of a work, attempting to understand
and experience the work.
Then We Imagine Actions
We seek audible and visible
behaviors
These can stimulate an audience to
appreciate the literature in their
own individual ways.
The Definition Develops
"the communication of the reader's
experience of the author's ideas
and feelings to the eyes and ears
of an audience, so that both the
reader and the audience
experience and appreciate the
author's literary creation ."
Not Don Geiger Definition,
Which Says:
“Oral interpretation, then, is an
unformulable amalgam of acting, public
speaking, critical reaction, and
sympathetic sharing.”
*Remember Bowen focus on experience of
audience and performer, different but
similar. Not a list of Parts.
Gura, Chapter One –
Definition of Interpretation
Most Important – Idea of
Communion
Sharing Experience
w/Audience
Definition
from Lee / Gura
“Interpretation is the art of
communicating to an audience a
work of literary art in its
intellectual, emotional, and
aesthetic entirety.”
Communion
“Sharing an experience with both
a work of literature and an
audience.”
Medium?
We communicate with an
audience by "vocal and physical
suggestion."
Intellectual and Emotional
- logical and emotion-arousing
qualities of literature.
- words, syntax (ordering of words in
phrases or poetic lines), images.
Includes meter, rhyme, rhythm, line
or sentence length, etc.
Aesthetic Entirety
- The crafted patterns that separate
art from ordinary words.
- Think of the qualities the book
requires of our selections--universality, individuality, and
suggestion.
Why Perform?
Ultimately --- to create human
understanding of ourselves and others.
"We think interpretation is the fullest way
to enjoy stories, poems, and plays,
because it allows us to share our
experiences and our pleasures with
others, and it allows others to join us in
creating that experience." - Gura