ORAL HISTORY

We started our oral history training with a two-day workshop in Philadelphia, using a discrete set of principles and practices as an orientation to the field. These included reciprocity, shared authority, co-creation, silence, and open-ended questions, among others. We committed to working with silence as a meaningful invitation for longform narrative and as a narrative support for interviewees who are actively shaping/reshaping their narratives, which they may confront and contradict in real-time if given this spacious silence to do so. Participants practiced offering silence and receiving silence, modeled as a seven-second interval between answers and subsequent questions without the introduction of any sound.

We used a set of listening exercises with sequential prompts to experience a range of interviewer/narrator dynamics related to silence, gaze and attention. How do we respond to competing stimulation, to apparent distraction, to relentless eye contact? How can we use oral history and training exercises to understand our communication styles (our preferences and default strategies)? What does “good listening” look like and feel like? How do we involve our bodies?

In outlining oral history values and characteristics, we distinguished oral history practice from journalistic practice, or even those intuitive habits we rely on in social settings. Allowing for silence is one example of an oral history tact that most would avoid in a social setting. We committed to truth and support over comfort, relying on our technique and body language to assure narrators that discomfort is part of the process, that oral historians are interested in not just the story but the struggle to tell the story. Participants’ questions advanced the conversation into areas of special concern and interest.

We adopted roles and field-specific terms for the roles as we took them on: interviewees would be called “narrators,” emphasizing the centrality of this role, primary rather than secondary. The interviewer commits to working without a script or set of questions, relating associatively and supportively as the narrator shapes–and gropes for–the story/stories they wish to tell.

We worked on following our narrators’ hierarchy of significance, meaning we would work with the narrators’ economy: we would give our special attention to whatever they deem important, resisting a more common narrative economy in which sensational stories are “worth more.” Our practice sessions were framed as “witness exercises” (see below).

The remainder of our time during the first oral history weekend was divided between a tech training with digital recorders and a survey of experimental sound/media work that makes use of oral history. The technical training encouraged a literacy around audio terms (wav files, mic gain, lo-cut filter) and ease with the actual recorders. We went over interview preparatory measures, including scanning the room for audio interference and doing a sound check. These remedial ideas were later transposed more abstractly as movement by Nichole and dancers.

Oral history training continued during the Hudson residency with actual interviews and more listening exercises, woven into writing exercises and movement scores. During the Hudson residency, dancers were divided into trios to record life histories with one another, based on maps drawn with prompts from Karinne.

Witness exercise

This activity requires groups of three or more participants, assigned the roles of 1] interviewer (one person), 2] narrator (one person) and 3] witness (one or more persons). As interviewer and narrator embark upon the first (unscripted) twenty minutes of an oral history interview, witness(es) work as scribe, noting continuously anything notable or eventful related to silence, open-ended questions, body language, roads not taken and changes in velocity or volume. The interview is interrupted by a facilitator at minute 20, after which the groups share their experiences and observations and then report back to the full group.