Tonight I saw class presentations for a college oral history class. They weren't your average "stand at a podium reading a paper" kind of presentations; they were oral history performances. "How do you perform an oral history?" you may be thinking. Or you may be thinking, "why is this guy using so many quotation marks in this post?" Or you may be thinking about the really good sandwich you're going to have in a minute. But assuming you're thinking about oral histories, the "how" of performance turned out to be very straightforward. Many of the students held papers printed with excerpts from transcripts of interviews they had conducted. They introduced their speaker and then read the excerpts. But it's selling them short to say that they
read the excerpts when they really
performed them. There was a big difference, which lay in the students assuming the personas of their speakers. They had minimal costumes if any, maybe a baseball cap or glasses or a scarf. And they were just sitting down, so there wasn't a lot of action on the stage. But these students really committed to inhabiting the voices and gestures of the speakers they were channeling onstage, and the combination of the students' commitment with the speakers' insights and experiences was powerful. Some of the people the students had interviewed were present, and they were moved to witness the students performing their words. The evening got me thinking about history, about talking and listening, and most of all about the power of performance. I experienced the strength of passionate and full commitment to the act of communication, and it was very inspiring.
