scholarly journals Speak for Yourself: Considerations of Ethics and Aesthetics in the Performance of a Community Oral History Project

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Young
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Dramatic Structure ◽  
Shared Authority ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site

This article outlines the creative and ethical process of staging a site-specific oral history community theatre project in the housing estate where I grew up in Omagh, Northern Ireland. Shandon Park -the name of the place and the performance- comprised of residents telling their own life stories in their homes in an investigation of memory, identity and place. The performance of memory articulated by people who were active agents in how they were presented investigated how the ownership of lived experience could exist within an effective dramatic structure. This article describes how the aesthetic qualities of performance within the reality of place were affected throughout the work by participants who continued to make changes to the piece. I describe how my dual role as past resident and present artist placed me at the intersection between ethics and aesthetics in the work and how my duty to members of my own community and my responsibility as an artist/researcher was in constant negotiation. In a consideration of Michael Frisch’s concept of ‘shared authority’ (1990), I will discuss how my own remembrance of Shandon Park was balanced with the needs of the participants and the requirements of the project to ensure that the work was both meaningful to an audience and indeed to my own theoretical enquiry.

scholarly journals Revolucionarios, internacionalistas y sobrevivientes. Una historia oral de la Revolución cubana.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Óscar López-Acón
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
America Latina

La Revolución cubana constituye probablemente el hecho más influyente en la historia contemporánea de América Latina por su alcance y significado. Todavía hoy, los ecos de aquel acontecimiento se proyectan sobremanera en el presente y los numerosos interrogantes que sigue generando lo convierten en un terreno extraordinariamente fértil para su estudio. En el presente artículo queremos explorar las potencialidades que ofrece la historia oral para tal fin. Para ello, nos servimos de las historias de vida de algunos sujetos que tuvieron experiencia directa o participaron del acontecer político y social de Cuba desde la década de los cincuenta hasta el presente en distintos escenarios. El rescate de sus voces nos permite acercarnos a la experiencia vivida de la Revolución y nos ayuda a comprender el significado mismo de ese proceso histórico. The Cuban Revolution constitute probably the most influential event in the contemporary history of Latin America due to its scope and significance. Even today, the echoes of that historical event are projected greatly in the present and the numerous of unanswered questions that still generate turn into extraordinary field to this study. In the present article we want to explore the potentialities what the oral history can offer us to reach that objective. In order to dive into this issue we shall focus in the life stories of some person who had direct experience or taken part in political and social happen in Cuba, from fifties decade to the present in a different scenes. The rescue of their voices allows us to approach the “lived experience” of the Revolution and helps us to know the very meaning of that historical process.

scholarly journals Parasomnia: Sleep against Capitalism

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
António Figueiredo Marques
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Continuous Stream ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site ◽  
Participatory Performance

Parasomnia (2019), a site-specific participatory performance by Patrícia Portela (PT/BE), addresses sleep in its biological and cultural meanings while retrieving its historicity. Sleep is one of the last resistance gestures against capitalised lives, opening a gap for social change through the aesthetic dimension as an extension of arts in politics. Parasomnia raises awareness for empathy and unproductiveness by inviting spectators to take a massage and eating delicacies. Bodily senses are therefore a way to activate potentials and becomings. Often understood as weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the actions elicited—contemplating, caring, and resting—bring up a strength and a capacity to arouse the imagination and fabulation as political acts. It is also argued that dimensions such as fantasmatic, cyclicity, and subjectivity are key social outputs of Parasomnia. Allowing for a pause in a continuous stream of goals, of connectivity and consumption, and without commodification purposes, sleep may return us to a sense of our own interiority made of several layers: like a fall into the sleep that enables alterity to emerge inside the self.

A Queer/ed Archival Methodology: Archival Bodies as Nomadic Subjects

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie Ann Lee
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
History Record ◽  
Interpretive Frame ◽  
A Site

This article highlights the particular - embodied - ways in which the human record can be collected, organized, and preserved. Engaging both archival and queer theories, the understanding of body-as-archives and archives-as-body is instantiated in the oral history record from one genderqueer poet. This poet's narration can be understood as a nomadic one of multiplicities, undoings, and metamorphoses. The far-reaching possibilities of the ongoing histories of the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming - archived (un)becomings - are at play and embodied throughout this archived oral history.  The archives can produce a dizzying effect through which, I argue, archivists can resist the urge to settle, to neatly organize, and to contain the archival records to consider new ways to understand and represent the dynamic (un)becomings. Through the interpretive frame of the nomadic, the archives can be understood as a site of (un)becomings and as a space that can hold moving living histories.

“Scrap-Heap Storiesˮ: Oral Narratives of Labour and Loss in Scottish Mining and Manufacturing

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-2018) ◽  
pp. 8-21
Author(s):  
Arthur McIvor
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Job Loss ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Industrial Work ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Plant Closures ◽  
The Impact

This article is an attempt to comprehend deindustrialisation and the impact of plant downsizing and closures in Scotland since the 1970s through listening to the voices of workers and reflecting on their ways of telling, whilst making some observations on how an oral history methodology can add to our understanding. It draws upon a rich bounty of oral history projects and collections undertaken in Scotland over recent decades. The lush description and often intense articulated emotion help us as academic “outsidersˮ to better understand how lives were profoundly affected by plant closures, getting us beyond statistical body counts and overly sentimentalised and nostalgic representations of industrial work to more nuanced understandings of the meanings and impacts of job loss. In recalling their lived experience of plant run-downs and closures, narrators are informing and interpreting; projecting a sense of self in the process and drawing meaning from their working lives. My argument here is that we need to listen attentively and learn from those who bore witness and try to make sense of these diverse, different and sometimes contradictory stories. We should take cognisance of silences and transgressing voices as well as dominant, hegemonic narratives if we are to deepen the conversation and understand the complex but profound impacts that deindustrialisation had on traditional working-class communities in Scotland, as well as elsewhere.

scholarly journals Functional expression of a yeast mitochondrial intron-encoded protein requires RNA processing at a conserved dodecamer sequence at the 3' end of the gene.

1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 1507-1512 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Zhu ◽  
H Conrad-Webb ◽  
X S Liao ◽  
P S Perlman ◽  
R A Butow
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Analysis ◽  
Rna Processing ◽  
Fold Increase ◽  
Functional Expression ◽  
Rrna Gene ◽  
Yeast Mitochondria ◽  
Wild Type ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Var1 Gene ◽  
A Site

All mRNAs of yeast mitochondria are processed at their 3' ends within a conserved dodecamer sequence, 5'-AAUAAUAUUCUU-3'. A dominant nuclear suppressor, SUV3-I, was previously isolated because it suppresses a dodecamer deletion at the 3' end of the var1 gene. We have tested the effects of SUV3-1 on a mutant containing two adjacent transversions within a dodecamer at the 3' end of fit1, a gene located within the 1,143-base-pair intron of the 21S rRNA gene, whose product is a site-specific endonuclease required in crosses for the quantitative transmission of that intron to 21S alleles that lack it. The fit1 dodecamer mutations blocked both intron transmission and dodecamer cleavage, neither of which was suppressed by SUV3-1 when present in heterozygous or homozygous configurations. Unexpectedly, we found that SUV3-1 completely blocked cleavage of the wild-type fit1 dodecamer and, in SUV3-1 homozygous crosses, intron conversion. In addition, SUV3-1 resulted in at least a 40-fold increase in the amount of excised intron accumulated. Genetic analysis showed that these phenotypes resulted from the same mutation. We conclude that cleavage of a wild-type dodecamer sequence at the 3' end of the fit1 gene is essential for fit1 expression.

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