Voices and Memory: Australian Oral History: 8 March 1997
Oral History: How Is It different? / Michelle Potter
As a practising oral history interviewer, my experience has been largely confined to interviewing performing artists. Within that wider category, I have concentrated particularly on people who work as dancers, choreographers, and directors and administrators of dance companies, as well as those who collaborate with them to produce what we see on stage in a dance performance. So, in looking at the question of how oral history is different, my remarks really reflect the experiences that I have had dealing with the Australian dance community. I suspect, however, that at least some of my musings also have a more general application.
The first point I would like to make is that oral history has unique characteristics that make it different from other historical sources. Over the past year or so I have been curating a National Library of Australia travelling exhibition, called Dance People Dance. In this exhibition I am using several short extracts from interviews in the Library's Oral History Collection and, in selecting them, the unique qualities of the primary oral material became immediately apparent. I have for example used a short extract from an interview with Kira Bousloff. Kira came to Australia in 1938 as a dancer with the touring Ballets Russes company the Covent Garden Russian Ballet. When the tour finished she made the decision to remain in Australia and went on eventually to establish what is now the West Australian Ballet. In the extract I am using for Dance People Dance, Kira talks about standing on the wharf in Adelaide in 1939 at the end of the tour watching the rest of the company sail out to return to Europe. In the Russian accent that she has never really lost in her almost 60 years as an Australian she describes how she stood there holding a streamer until it finally broke, and how she listened to the slowly receding voices of her friends as they chanted her name in farewell. It is an incredibly evocative description. The human voice is rich with interest and juxtaposing oral history with other printed and visual sources in an exhibition highlights oral history's difference and adds a distinctive, human quality to the show.
But, pushing my musings a little further I began to consider the diversity of public perceptions of dancers. They range from the idea that dancers are poorly educated with little to offer other than a nice pair of legs to look at or a handsome body with rippling muscles, to public adulation of the most extreme kind that elevates the dancer to the status of a demi-god. In this latter category I am thinking of dancers of the ilk of the now-dead Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn and living stars such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, and perhaps Baryshnikov's compatriot Natalia Makarova and the younger French star Sylvie Guillem - 'Gorgeous Guillem' as she was called in a recent Sydney Morning Herald profile.
Public perceptions of dance as an art form are similarly diverse. To some, dance has scarcely moved past frivolous entertainment, to others it can offer the viewer an extraordinary non-verbal experience and speak, as it were, about matters that cannot be put into words. Here, and picking up on the non-verbal aspect of dance, is a quote from an interview with Baryshnikov, extracts from which were originally published in a German dance magazine in May 1994. In that interview Baryshnikov says:
I don't like talking about my work. Either you've seen me dance or you haven't. You either liked it or you didn't. I don't believe that people would like to know why and how I dance a piece, or why I work with this or that choreographer. Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible. (quoted in Siegel, 1996, p. 29)
Pursuing this question of the non-verbal aspect of dance, it seems to me that dance is often its own worst enemy. The kind of attitude expressed by Baryshnikov does nothing to advance the cause of dance as any kind of serious art form. It is true that dancers communicate in a unique way through the medium of the human body, and that choreographers strive to maximise that special capacity that dancers have. But it seems to me that dance is non-verbal only in its moment of performance. It takes a lot of talking and heaps of verbal communication skills to get dance out of the classroom and the rehearsal studio and onto the stage for public viewing and eventual touring. It also takes much thought, reading and talking ideas through with others to choreograph a dance work. As I endeavour to show in the Dance People Dance exhibition, dance does reveal much about who we are as people. Dance reflects our social and cultural values and mirrors how we build our identity. Baryshnikov has not been much help I have to say and his remarks have also inspired mild outrage in the persuasive New York dance critic Marcia Siegel who wrote in a recent critical article:
As long as the dance profession is content to exist from day to newly choreographed day, grounded in nothing more solid than glamorous myths and unexamined pseudo-histories, the public won't have any reason to share its [dance's] self-regard as a primary component of culture. (Siegel, 1996, p.30)
Oral history can step into this world of 'glamorous myths and unexamined pseudo-histories' where it has much to offer as a verbal source for an art form that loves to play on the idea that it is unique because its sources are non-verbal. In the past year or so, along with preparing for Dance People Dance, I have interviewed 10 people for my book A Passion for Dance, published by the National Library of Australia. The interviews with those 10 people, all of whom have made a contribution to Australian dance in the 1990s, make it perfectly clear to anyone who cares to take a look that dancers are, despite perceptions, articulate human beings. They have ideas about and intentions for their art form. Dance does go beyond the non-verbal, and for the dance community oral history becomes a different kind of source material, a source that, whether people like Baryshnikov like it or not, has a special role in helping to debunk myths about the performing arts, and about dance in particular.
I guess what I want to emphasise is that not only does oral history have unique qualities because the human voice is its primary source material, but that it is also in some circumstances a different critical tool, a pro-active critical tool. I love the idea of what I would like to call applied oral history. I love being able to use recordings-either in their primary oral form or in a written, edited version-in exhibitions, writing, lectures and on other occasions where it might be appropriate and useful. It seems to me that it is in these applied cases that oral history's difference becomes most noticeable and certainly most useful.
Reference
Siegel Marcia B., 'Visible Secrets: Style Analysis and Dance Literacy'. In Gay Morris (ed.), Moving Words: Re-writing Dance. London: Routledge, 1996
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Last updated 5 November 1997
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