History Essay: Comparing the Techniques of Anna Deveare Smith and Moises Kaufman

Comparing the Techniques of Anna Deveare Smith and Moises Kaufman
Name
Student Number
Course
Due Date
Comparing the Techniques of Anna Deveare Smith and Moises Kaufman
Emotional Technique
Anna Deveare Smith is identified as having the creativity to blur the lines between theatre and journalism through text from real-life encounters towards the creation of gripping portraits. The aspect of accessing the interviewees’ actual voices leads to the achievement of a unique perspective of the accounts of the author that the reading of other books cannot provide. Such a provision provides a greater depth of character by using such effects as tone, inflection, and raw emotion that enables the audience to experience other storytelling layers through voice.[Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror. Anchor, 2015.]
Even though there is no specific mention as such by Smith or Kauffman, there is an eminent comparison between their works. Kauffman’s work provides the channel as a model for Smith’s long-term series of plays. There is a demonstration by Smith on the powerful effects of recreating raw emotion in her performance. “To me, the most important doorway into the soul of a person is her or his words” (12). . In this case, the nature of Smith’s performance reveals the pain and frustration as reflected in the tone inflections.[Ibid]
The technique that Smith applies to reflect the various vocalizations, as well as gestures verbatim from the interview records, in this case, provides a bridge from character to the actor. Simultaneously, the technique also provides an actor to a character, thus creating a symbiotic relationship that adds value to the impact of storytelling. As seen in Moises Kaufmann and Smith in Fires in the Mirror, there is the aspect of capturing a similar authenticity in the identification of the culture. In this case, the dual-focused approach of reporting narrative through language as done by Smith and the common threshold that unifies the tragic event creates the ability to find the unexpected alongside the unguarded within every speaker as an objective base of interfering with the big picture.
While Smith and Kauffmann perform research on individuals representing their cultural world view, two significant differences exist between their presentation approaches. Kauffman bases his research on extensive study of certain individuals within a specific environment, yet not exclusively based on personal interviews. From the perspective of being interviewers and participatory observers, Kaufman emphasizes the value of exchanging between themselves and the interviewees more than towards the objective reporting of the event as journalists.
Kauffman spends considerable time, approximately fifteen months, building trust and familiarizing with interviewees alongside the town’s culture. In this case, the approach is considered by Kauffman as far more detailed as compared to the work done by most television journalists. Comparatively, Smith spends only a few days, specifically, eight days undertaking interviews on individuals for Fires in the Mirror. However much they share depiction of tragic events, Smith’s work is identified as lacking some degree of a...