Just Call Us Dancers - Oral History in the Performing Arts

• In Event: Oral History in Artistic Mediums

Abstract

Just Call Us Dancers
Oral History in the performing arts

This presentation exposes a dance artist's journey to oral history. It argues that a specific knowledge in a mostly non-verbal area helps to create interviews that bridge the gap between orality and the body. In my practice, the oral history documents explore artistic creation through the personal memories of the many agents involved in the creative process.

the paradoxical body
A dancer's body experiencing choreography bears marks. These marks can be referred as embodied knowledge. Articulating this knowledge in interviews, and placing these in a historiographic matrix helps to identify choreographic developments.

Personal memories in dance depends on:

1. role
In an institutional dance setting, knowledge is acquired according to a role (Gil 2001) assigned in the theater structure.

2. orality in dance
Orality has a special relationship in dance, one talks about dance in many ways. Orality in a dance studio can be pragmatic, affective or metaphorical - always combined with movement. To help interviewees create a narrative, one travels a dangerous methodological line of intervention.

Myself, having experienced many roles describe above, and having a keen interest in articulating the knowledge specific to dance, was drawn into further studies in Cultural Sciences at the Fernuniversität in Hagen, Germany. There, I came in contact with the methodology of Oral History, and saw its potential to articulate dance experience and skills. During my studies I came to a position in a renowned dance-artist's archives creating oral history documents. The methodological challenges, and the very specific goals pushed me to devise workflows that are unique to our needs.

There are still many hurdles to establish our oral history collection; for that, constant reflection and exchange with other professionals, both in oral history and in our field of dance, is needed.

Author

• Ricardo Viviani, Pina Bausch Foundation