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 from 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.
