UHM UHHH

Description

The full group of dancers moves along the edges of the stage creating a series of tableaus and small fields of action while an audio recording of their voices plays. The audio is an edit of in-between utterances taken from their oral history interviews, with words and language content removed.

Process

This was our first attempt to make an audio edit from the interviews with a tightly selective focus. The task was to collect sounds uttered between words. Suzanne often reminds us that in the practice of oral history, the struggle to tell the story is the story, with gaps, false starts and the vocal tenor and manner as meaningful as the story being told. We edited together the struggle sounds (umms, uhs), the pregnant pauses, the giggles, the halting and the changes of direction.

Inspiration

Inspired by Nina Katchadourian’s counter narrative moon landing piece (in which she extracted and edited together all of the uhms and uhs from the confident speeches made about the moon landing, excising the confident speech), this was a first exploration of the possibility of extracting and combining short elements, letting go of the aim to preserve the integrity of a full interview.

Questions

Can this idea be developed further? What overarching goals do we have when extracting or maintaining certain sounds? Do we think of it like a song? What are the ethical considerations around this kind of selective editing, with its deviation from the collaborative process of collecting, interviewing and listening?