Blogs

What Can “Oral History” Teach Us?

[This blog was first published as a short paper on the ActiveHistory.ca website earlier this month]

From ‘Interviewee’ to ‘Character’ – A Reflection on Language and Discipline (blog 6)

From Transcript to Script (blog 5)

“The collection of transcribed interviews is the raw material and the art lies in the imaginative structuring, editing, sifting, and shaping of this material into a coherent and performable script.”
- Pam Schweitzer, Reminiscence Theatre, p 46.

“Making Rainbows”: David Fennario as Neighbourhood Storyteller (Blog 4)

What does performance offer oral historians and vice versa?

One of the questions that I have been asking myself in recent weeks is how I might integrate what we are learning in the “Oral history and performance” studio-seminar into my own practice as an oral historian? In my case, this is a difficult question. I am not an actor. Nor am I a playwright. How then might I usefully contribute to the staging of oral histories? And, conversely, how might performing these stories contribute to my interpretation of the interviews themselves?

FROM ORAL HISTORY TO VERBATUM THEATRE: A REFLECTION

“Verbatim Theatre is a form of theatre which places interviews with people at the heart of the process and product, since such interviews provide a foundation from which a script is developed that is then performed by actors.” Deirdre Heddon, 2009, p. 115.

“Documentary theatre has always been heavily context-based, and so tends to come to the fore in troubled times.” - Derek Paget (2010).

As part of my contribution to our continuing exploration of “oral history and performance” this term, I thought that I would write a series of reflections and post them in basecamp. These will, I hope, also serve as the building blocks of a (very) short article that I want to write for a special issue of alt.theatre on the Montreal Life Stories Project, being edited by Ted Little.

Oral History and Performance I: Origins

DE RETOUR DU BRÉSIL, DES IDÉES PLEIN LA TÊTE!
Janvier 2010

Sandra Gasana et moi avons passé deux semaines au Brésil pour rencontrer les gens du Museu da Pessoa (Musée de la Personne). Nous avons fait le voyage en compagnie de deux membres de l’équipe du Centre d’histoire de Montréal qui travaillent également avec l’histoire orale et la mémoire. Le séjour a été en partie financé par l’Office Québec-Amérique pour la jeunesse et par Histoires de vie Montréal.

Formation au Musée de la personne de São Paulo…
Janvier 2010

Depuis quelques semaines déjà, des élèves de cinquième secondaire de l’École internationale de Montréal participent à un projet qui allie pédagogie, entrevues d’histoire de vie et conception d’une exposition.

Pour en savoir plus sur ce projet: http://histoiresdevie-chili.blogspot.com/

Voici le blogue de Gabriela Mizrahi qui a réalisé sa première entrevue récemment.

"My impressions of the interview with Claudia