Spoken Karaoke

Photo courtesy of the artist

PLEASE NOTE: SPOKEN KARAOKE is a participatory event. Sign up in advance in the Segal Lobby.

Spoken Karaoke is a participatory event that invites people to perform speeches as they would ordinarily perform songs in a karaoke bar. Speeches are, after all, songs of persuasion, argument, consolidation or motivation. Traditional karaoke offers an occasion to assert shared ownership of the pop music corpus, and simultaneously an opportunity to announce one’s identity through the choice of material to perform. Spoken Karaoke allows us to play with this legacy of spoken artifacts, treating snippets and snatches of public address like a Top 40 radio of the collective discourse.

Artists Involved: Sound design by Vladimir Kudryatsev; assistance by Lola Harney.

Lead Artist: Director and writer ANNIE DORSEN works in a variety of fields, including theatre, film, dance and, as of 2010, digital performance. Most recently, Hello Hi There premiered at the streirischer herbst festival (Graz), and was presented at Black Box Teatre (Oslo), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) and PS122 (New York), among many others. She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which she also directed. Spike Lee has since made a film of her production of the piece, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, subsequently screened at South by Southwest Film Festival and The Tribeca Film Festival, and was released theatrically by IFC in 2010 before being broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances. In 2009 she created two music-theatre pieces, Ask Your Mama, a setting of Langston Hughes’ 1962 poem, composed by Laura Karpman and sung by Jessye Norman and The Roots (Carnegie Hall) and ETHEL’s Truckstop, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Her pop-political performance project Democracy in America was presented at PS122 in spring 2008. She is currently a visiting artist professor at Bard College.

Upcoming: Spoken Karaoke will play in March at Black Box Theatre, Oslo, and BIT Teatergarasjen, Bergen.

anniedorsen.com