If You Wanna Switch Seats, We Could 

During the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency, VPL will embark on an arts-based investigation in collaboration with several middle and high schools across the mid-Atlantic region and from around the United States. The performed investigation, entitled If you wanna switch seats, we could, will focus on an excerpt of the presidential debate that took place on September 29th, 2020, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, moderated by Chris Wallace. The title comes from actual text spoken by Chris Wallace during the debate. 

Throughout this project, students and teachers, in collaboration with VPL artist-researchers, used the ethnodramatic form of verbatim performance to explore these overarching research questions: 

• What do young actors discover about these candidates and the moderator when they take on their speech and gestural patterns through verbatim performance?
• What happens to an audience’s perception of the interactions between the adults during this debate when younger and different bodied actors take on these roles?

The young actors and their teachers explored these questions and others that emerged by embodying the words and actions of the candidates and moderator, word-for-word, stutter-for-stutter, and gesture-for-gesture through their rehearsal and performance process. Once their investigation was completed, each team filmed their performance(s), and these were shared publicly with their school communities and beyond as part of a day-long virtual festival held on Saturday, April 17, 2021. 

Participating Schools