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ANNA DEAVERE SMITH TO DELIVER CONVOCATION ADDRESS
The celebrated actor, playwright and activist Anna Deavere Smith will deliver the convocation address at Bryn Mawr's 115th commencement on Saturday, May 15, the Commencement Convocation Speaker Committee has announced. Smith, the winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and the founder of the Institute on Art and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University, is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. As the creator of a new genre of documentary performance, Smith has been called "the most exciting individual in American theater" by Newsweek.
Smith has appeared in several films, including Dave, An American President, Philadelphia and the recent The Human Stain, and she appears regularly in the NBC series The West Wing as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally. But she is best known in the theater world for her groundbreaking solo performances, including the Obie Award winners Fires in The Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, both of which deal with the fragmentation of American society along shifting and complex racial lines. For each of these performances, Smith interviewed hundreds of people about their experiences of a highly visible racial conflict and carefully recorded their responses. The plays stitch together their words, verbatim, in a series of monologues. When Smith performs the plays, she embodies each interview subject — as many as 40 in one show — with meticulous attention to every nuance of speech and gesture.
Fires in the Mirror and Twilight are part of a body of work Smith calls "On the Road: The Search for American Character." She has been creating these documentary monologues for more than 20 years. Among the thousands of people she has interviewed are shopkeepers, journalists, politicians, religious leaders, jurors, restaurateurs, political activists, homemakers, police officers, U.S. presidents and quite a few academics — including Bryn Mawr President Nancy J. Vickers, at an earlier stage in her career.
The New York Times has called her "the ultimate impressionist: she does people's souls." Smith's ambition is to foster dialogue about divisive issues of racial, ethnic and political identity with performances that emphasize the role of speech and gesture in constituting such identities. "Character lives in how a person speaks as well as in what he or she says, and in the inability to speak as well as in moments of fluid articulation," Smith says.
"The theater is by nature the art form that creates action through dialogue," says Smith. "In such a time as this, when our national conversation about race has become to some extent merely fragments of monologues, the theater of Twilight seeks to suggest that a conversation can be created from these fragments. It seeks to be a part of that conversation."
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