Abstract
Oral history’s multifaceted connection with place, this chapter proposes, comes into sharper view when we look at it through the optic of performance. Oral history, place, and performance maintain a dynamic connection with each other that is mutually illuminating. This essay considers some implications of this connection by drawing on the example of our current research project, funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has made extensive use of oral history in an attempt to engage with the history of performance practice in a particular local context. Under the title “‘It Was Forty Years Ago Today… ’: Locating the Early History of Performance Art in Wales 1965–1979”1 the project—for which, as the title implies, questions of place are of major significance-has employed different approaches to the placing of its oral history conversations: these include conversations staged in public, in-situ interviews, and installations that aim to locate audiences’ memories. Underlying all three approaches is the proposition that oral history interviews can be regarded as instances of located performance, or even site-specific performance. We will argue that to foreground the performative dimension of an oral history conversation in this manner directs our attention more closely to the influence that its location exerts on the construction of its narrative. The ways in which artists have made use of performance’s material bond with its setting can hereby serve as models for developing new ways of locating oral history conversations. And these new ways may help to create an oral history that, by being responsive to the sites where it takes place, offers in turn new insights into the contextual nature of performance.
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Notes
Della Pollock, “Introduction: Remembering,” in Remembering: Oral History Performance, edited by Della Pollock (New York, Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1.
Linda Shopes and Bruce M. Stave, Preface, in Remembering: Oral History Performance, edited by Della Pollock (New York, Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), xi.
Jeff Friedman, “Fractious Action: Oral History-Based Performance,” in Handbook of Oral History, edited by Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Alta Mira Press, 2006), 473. Henceforth referred to as Friedman, “Fractious Action.”
Ronald, J. Grele, “Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” in The Oral History Reader, 1st edition, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 1998), 44.
For a more comprehensive discussion of the relationship between performance and oral history see in particular the works of Della Pollock (Remembering; and “Moving Histories: Performance and Oral History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, edited by Tracy C. Davis [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008]. Also see Jeff Friedman (“Fractious Action;” see note 4; and “Muscle Memory: Performing Embodied Knowledge,” in Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection, edited by Richard Cándida-Smith [New York/ London: Routledge, 2002]). Such work builds on the earlier performance-oriented scholarship of Richard Bauman; see, for example, Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1977) and Ruth Finnegan
see, for example, Ruth Finnegan, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices (London: Routledge, 1992).
Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 86.
For a discussion of site-specific performance practice, see Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art (London: Routlege, 2000).
Gay McAuley, “Local Acts: Site Specific Performance Practice,” About Performance 7 (2007), 9.
See above all, the collection edited by Cándida-Smith, Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection (New York/London: Routledge, 2002).
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© 2011 Shelley Trower
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Roms, H., Edwards, R. (2011). Oral History as Site-Specific Practice: Locating the History of Performance Art in Wales. In: Trower, S. (eds) Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339774_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339774_9
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