By Chideraa Emma-Ugwuoke

Last year, I joined Speech and Debate Club. It was a really fun experience, but I wasn’t as confident and as engaging as I am now. Because of that, I only competed in one event last year, which was Impromptu. Impromptu is when someone gives you a topic and you pick any part of the topic and talk about it for five minutes.

Ever since I joined Speech and Debate Club, I felt more drawn to the Speech aspect of the club. When most people think about Speech & Debate Club, they only focus on the Debate part. But, the Speech aspect of the club, specifically Dramatic Interpretation, is also very interesting.

Dramatic Interpretation is very similar to acting. It is when you take a script or monologue from a play, movie, television show, or book, and act it out. In the first tournament of the school year, I decided to compete in Dramatic Interpretation. It was an amazing and fun experience. My piece was based on a story about a girl who meets a doctor in her garden and has a very intense back-to-back conversation with him about how she wants to be left alone. However, when I performed this piece at the tournament, I altered the story and turned the girl into a person who has schizophrenia and thinks she is having a conversation with a doctor, when she’s really not. Thanks to Drama Club and Acting I, I was able to convey a lot of emotion into my performance. 

Even though I didn’t place first, I learned a lot from my first experience with Dramatic Interpretation and that it is important to make sure that you’re telling a story that the audience can understand, just like when you are performing in a theater production. Hopefully, this will inspire you to join Speech and Debate Club and try out Dramatic Interpretation!