Oral History Performance Research Articles

Transforming relations through oral history performance: restorative justice and the DOHR project

ABSTRACT Central to restorative justice is a commitment to sharing and listening to first voice. This is required for the work of transitioning to just relations. The Restorative Inquiry for the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children (The Home), and its Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project, offers a significant example of the power of restorative justice for transitional justice through the performance of oral histories. DOHR has created a curriculum centred on a virtual reality experience of former residents’ oral histories. This paper examines how this curriculum supports restorative justice through a pedagogy of listening and relational scenography.

Museums as Stage: Opening Doors through Oral History Performance

Museums as Stage: Opening Doors through Oral History Performance

Oral History Performance as Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Oral History Performance as Interdisciplinary Collaboration

“I know how it is when nobody sees you”: oral-history performance methods for staging trauma

ABSTRACT In this essay, I argue that, in a society oversaturated with images and narratives of racial trauma, creating theatre for social change requires more than staging minoritarian bodies with the aim of making their trauma visible. Contemporary oral-history performance practitioners must face the challenge of how to make the hypervisible meaningful. Drawing on my own production The (M)others, an oral-history performance adapted from the narratives of Bay-Area women who have lost family members to police violence, I present a methodology that works to disrupt the ways contemporary audiences are invited to passively consume, rather than actively intervene in, acts of racial trauma.

Everything but the Stage: Toward a Feminist Theatrical Praxis

This article explores what new ideas about feminism emerge when we shift our gaze from the stage to the quotidian and invisible processes of theater-making. It asks us to consider, How might our artistic praxes speak to our politics, beliefs, and identities? How can we mobilize the creative process as a daily rehearsal for our feminist futures? To do this, I reflect on my own process of creating The (M)others, a community-engaged oral history performance based on testimonies of families who have lost loved ones at the hands of police. Specifically, I explore the mundane sites of the staged reading, talkback, and rehearsal process as spaces of quiet revolution rife with feminist potential for those who listen closely.

Taking Their Place Among the Giants: Performing Oral Histories of Pennsylvania’s Black Freedom Struggle

Oral history performance is an important tool for making history, but performing oral histories also raises important questions about what kind of history is being made, issues of particular relevance to the performed histories of underrepresented minority groups, such as African Americans. This article focuses on a case study of Another River Flows, an African American oral history performance staged in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley in 2008. It examines the complex creative processes through which this performance came to fruition. More importantly, it analyzes how oral history performance was the creative vehicle through which three small, long-ignored, sometimes internally divided, and mostly quiet African American communities of the urban North came to assert a bold, collective history of struggle and resistance for themselves, one in keeping with heroic tales of the national black freedom struggle.

The Catastrophe of Childhood Rape: Traversing the Landscape between Private Memory and Public Performance

The Catastrophe of Childhood Rape: Traversing the Landscape between Private Memory and Public Performance

An exploration of the aesthetics of an oral history performance developed in the classroom

This paper aims to explore a range of aesthetic aspects involved in the devising and production processes of oral history performance in a classroom setting. It touches upon the ethical dimension of aesthetics employing the Confucianist Wang Yang Ming's aesthetic philosophy and Buber's theories of relation as the theoretical frames. The devising process realises the concept of aestheticisation of ethics by fulfilling the ‘I–You’ relations through the constructed dialogues formulated by the teacher-facilitator. The paper is divided into six parts to illustrate the whole aesthetic system – from aesthetic framework to reception. I apply Ricoeur's narrative theory to analyse the cycle of re-interpretation and reception process of the personal narratives. Deleuze's theories in ‘Signs and Memory’ have been employed to decipher how the signs of art have been distilled from personal memories. Bachelard's poetics of space and Lefebvre's theories of the subversive power of space have been employed to demonstrate the possibility of the presentation and subversion of body and space through performance. In conclusion, I apply Shusterman's pragmatist aesthetics to argue that oral history performances put ethics into action by re-negotiating personal and collective identities through dialogical process and re-interpreting the past.

Remembering: Oral History Performance. Edited by Della Pollock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; pp. xii+205. $79.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Remembering: Oral History Performance. Edited by Della Pollock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; pp. xii+205. $79.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Paradoxes in Community-Based Pedagogy: Decentering Students through Oral History Performance

Paradoxes in Community-Based Pedagogy: Decentering Students through Oral History Performance

Performing oral history: Storytelling and pedagogy

This essay addresses the potential of oral history performance to explore human communication across cultures. The study describes a class project in collecting and performing oral history interviews. By engaging students as field researchers to gather oral texts, and through the use of performance as a mode of historical, cultural, and interpersonal inquiry, students meet their interview subjects in a dialogic encounter designed to enhance their understanding of another person's experience.