Oral History as Site-Specific Practice: Locating the History of Performance Art in Wales

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.