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'Muscle Memory': Performing Oral History Author(s): Jeff Friedman Source: Oral History, Vol. 33, No. 2, Memory Work (Autumn, 2005), pp. 35-47 Published by: Oral History Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40179868 . Accessed: 01/04/2014 03:52
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'MUSCLE MEMORY': ORAL HISTORY

by JeffFriedman
Performance as a outcome of oral history productionis now acknowledged ' as a legitimate application and method of dissemination. However, performance is also a research practice allowing oral historians to further interrogate their areas of interest through an exploration of embodied interpretationof memory construction. Muscle Memory is an originalsolo dance/text work using life histories of dancers as primaryresearch materials. The essay includes excerpts from sample oral histories that not only represent historicalfigures and actions but also address the meaning of the oral history event by embodyingtheories of dialogics, memory construction, inter-and intrasubjectivity.
[H]istory begins with bodies and artifacts; oral history does not escape that law [...] the moment of fact creation is continually carriedover in the very bodies of the individuals who partake in that transmission. The source is alive.1 Becauseof the temporalnatureof dance, the art form has a lack of primarydocuments;it is difficult to record an account of live performance.As a result,we know littleof how movement practicesspeakto history.This lack, while due to manycomplexfactors,also can be attributed in part to the contingenciesof live performance. Further, dancing is a phenomenon inseparablefrom its embodied medium; Yeats inquired,'how can we separatethe dancerfrom the dance?'.2 We might obtain remedies for these difficulties at the level of methodology, that is, identifying documentation strategies commensurate with dance that adequately recordlive performance. AnthropologistPierre Bourdieusuggests, *[p]robably the only way to give accountof the practicalcoherenceof practices and works is to construct models which reproduce, in their own terms, the logic from which that coherence is generated.'3 Consequently,dance calls for a documentarymethod that is also alive: embodied, contingent and temporal. Oral history interviews share these qualities,matchingthe logic of dance by fulfilling all three criteria. DANCE AND ORAL HISTORY: A SHARED LOGIC While oral history interviews are accounts of historical actions emplotted over time in the past, interviewsthemselvesare real-timeevents narratedas a type of verbal performance.This liveness matches dance as a performing art. Interdependent with its temporality as a process, interviews are also contingent in that they are vulnerable to the particularities of location, how they are historically situated in time, and the subjectivities of participants. Compounding these qualities, oral history interviews are especially contingent in the sense of linguist Mikhail Bakhtin's theory regardingthe dialogicformationof knowledge. Nineteenth and early twentieth century
Autumn2005 ORAL HISTORY 35

PERFORMIN

ABSTRACT|
KEYWORDS: dance; oral history; choreography; memory

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positivist historians such as Leopold von Ranke, Charles Seignobos and Charles von Langlois, among others, advocated a strict relianceon written documents. In Voiceof the Past, PaulThompson quotes von Langloisand Seignobosfrom theirIntroductionto the Study of History: *[t]he historian works with documents [....] There is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history/4 These artefacts were then used to create historical narrativesthat purporteda detached objectivity,'supplyingbricksof unemotionalfact for an edifice of historical truth/5 Later critics such as Georg Iggers and Konrad von Moltke in their introductionto Ranke'sThe Theoryand Practice of History state: *[r]elatedto Ranke's narrow conception of the state was a narrow conception of what constituted historical evidence. The relianceon written and particularly political documents produced a methodological bias in the writing of history'.6 Positivist historians acknowledged that written evidence was biased. They evaluated documents for verifiability and reliability, taking into account how the historian's own identity embedded in a particular context affected his or her historiographicinterpretation of evidence. However,their positivist bias against oral sources was defined against the wrong criteria, that is, how written evidence was constructed. Instead, oral sources are constructed in real time, where interviewers coproduce a historicalnarrativeby generating questions that frame their narrator'sreminiscences. The oral history method has different properties,allowing new historical subjectivities to emerge. Bakhtin elaborates how this coproduced meaning is emergent within communication events. In particular, his theory of utterance supportsascribingcontingencyto oral history. Both subjectsin a dialogueformulatetheirown utterance in relation to the previous cache of expressive communication as it accumulates between speakers.In PamMorris'collection of essays on Bakhtin, she states that 'every concrete utterancealways reflects the immediate small social event - the event of communication out of which it directly arose.'7Thus, any oral response is embedded within and produced from inside the intertwining relationship of the speakers,alive to all the contingencies of both subjects and their social/historicalcontext. I suggest that the historicalelement of oral interviews adds a particular urgency to my mission is argument.Because the interviewer's to both elicit the unique observations of the narratorand link those experiences to a larger historical matrix, interviews often focus on
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decision-making.How an individualinterprets and then acts in reference to historical events and trends that surroundtheir personal experience, constitutes contingency. That contingency, alternatives considered and choices made, becomes significantcontent in the interview. Consequently, Bakhtin's generalclaim for contingency in oral discourse is brought into specific focus through the lens of an oral history where alternatives and choices are elicited by skillful questioning. This is one of the intrinsic glories of oral history:we have a chance to reveal alternatives considered but not taken, revealingthe full three-dimensional humanityof historicalaction. Completing my criteria of similar logic, dance and oral history interviews are both embodied events. As the sociologist Erving Goffman states in his early text, Behavior in Public Places: the information an individual provides, whether he [sic] sends it or exudes it, may be embodied or disembodied. A frown, a spoken word, or a kick is a message that a sender conveys by means of his own current bodily activity, the transmission occurring only during the time that his body is present to sustain this activity.8 ExpandingGoffman'spoint, I suggest that the body never stops moving; there are subtle shifts of posture achievingbalanceand muscle tone beyondnormalawarenessof our limb and facial gestures. All embodied aspects of interviewing, including posture shifts, limb gestures,facialexpressionsand full body movements, provideadditionaland importantinformation to interviews. Folklorist Elizabeth Fine's book, The Folklore Text:FromPerformanceto Print, supports this position, that verbalperformancessuch as oral history can and should be analysed for both their semantic and somatic contents. However,Fine cautions us to go further:avoid remainingstuck in the analyticmode. Instead, the author proposes that resynthesising elements back into interpretive performance providesan importantnext step in the research process.9 From his experience working in African societies, anthropologist Johannes Fabian furthers Fine's proposal where, in his text Power and Performance,he states: [w]hat has not been given sufficient consideration is that about largeand important aspects of cultureno one, not even the native, has informationthat can simply be called up and expressedin discursivestate-

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ments.This sort of knowledgecan be represented - made present - only through action, enactmentor performance.10 Fabian recounts such an episode where a cohort of men believed they could understand a well-known African proverb better if they created a performance about it. The performance that emergedcomprehensivelyresolved the proverb'sambiguitiesto great satisfaction to themselves and their audience. Fabiancalls for an ongoing cycle: from text to performance and back again, recycling through each interpretiveformatto gain greaterdepths of understandingfor complex life-worlds. Through Fabianand Fine, I am calling for oral historiansto appropriatea more interpretive and creative role. Because oral interviewing is alreadya performanceevent, the process of converting narratives into performance is, from Bourdieu's perspective, allied to the primarysource's original logic. Consequently, as a form of researchinquiryadds performance a powerful interpretive lens for oral history materialsand can contributeto greaterunderstandingof the life-worldsinterviews evoke. DANCE ORAL HISTORYCOLLECTION CHOREOGRAPHY GENERATES Because of the devastating effect of AIDS on my dance colleagues, many early and midcareer artists' lives and their creative work were lost to history.Compelledto prevent this loss of historicalcontinuity,in 1988, 1 created LEGACYto record, preserveand disseminate the oral histories of a whole generation of teachers,administradancers,choreographers, tors and critics. By 2005, LEGACY has recorded over seventy oral histories from multipledance genres. Manyof these narrators were at-risknot only for AIDS, but other lifethreateningillnesses such as cancerand as frail elders. The collection has recentlyexpandedto include music and theatre community membersas well.11 In 1994, as a working choreographerand dancer, I created Muscle Memory to recycle some of LEGACY'Soral history narratives about performingcareers back into a theatrical mode. Along with its role as a publicmemoalso offers rial,MuscleMemory's choreography critical commentaryon representationalpractices in dance. Narrativein moderndance from the 1930s and 1940s often adapted literary worksusing plots and charactersfrom a variety of recognisablesources such as Greekmyths in Martha Graham'swork and Shakespeare for Jose Limon's The Moor's Pavane. As dance critic Sally Banes suggests in her text Writing Dancing in the Age of Post-modernism,chore-

ography in subsequent years of postmodernismthen strippedaway outside literary referencepoints in orderto focus on movement itself as content. Notably,dance artist Yvonne Rainer's1960s manifesto rejects narrativeand visual spectacle for a minimalismthat favored the choreographyof ideas. In her articlewith Noel Carroll,'Dance and Spectacle in the United States in the Eighties and Nineties,' Banes argues that political upheavals in subsequent decades challenged later post-modernist choreographers. How could they reinstall more direct meaning through movement without going backwards aesthetically? One solution was a new approachto narrative.Banes notes that choreographersbegan using text in 1970s and 1980s post-modern dances as a parodic metacommentary on narrative forms. For example, using familiarfairytales for a new dance might support political statements on the infantilizing effect of currentregimes. of this era also used autoChoreographers biographicalmaterials,often untold narratives by women, homosexuals,and performersfrom non-Western backgrounds. Their tactics furtherrevealedthe personalas political, especially where a dancer'sbody itself was situated As within oppressive systems of domination.12 an audience, student and practitionerof these dance activisms, I inherited postmodernist approaches in my own career. When it came time to create Muscle Memory,both methods were instinctive choreographic tools with which I represented the stories of dancers, often silenced by history. In the next sections of my essay, I discuss these methodsby which I chose to representthe embodied,temporaland contingentqualitiesof both dancingand the historicalevents to which that dancing refers. These methods include on the temporalconstrucformalcommentaries tion of memory processes and the inter- and intrasubjectivities of the interviewer's and narrator'semergent dialogue. I both describe and 'perform'excerptsfrom MuscleMemoryto illustratemy artisticchoices. THE DIALOGICFORMATIONOF KNOWLEDGEAS CHOREOGRAPHIC STRATEGY While a solo performance, I consciously constructed Muscle Memory to conserve the dialogicroles of interviewerand narratorin the oral history interview. The choreography demonstrates these roles by including both myself as interviewer and my physical interpretations of two separate narrators. After carefullyediting interviewtranscriptsto create a performancescript that I would deliver solo,
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I also wrote new text to name myself as 'the listener' in the performance's prologue and epilogue. In the following excerptfrom Muscle Memory'sperformance script, I speak as the listener,explainingmy role in creatingthe original interviews: Listen. Find a pulse. Listen to the pulse. Inside muscle fibre, the fibres inside twitch. Twitch the switch to muscle memory and listen to the pulse down your spine Open the bones, open the bones. Listen to the pulse of muscle memory inbetween the bones. Open the bones, twitch the switch to muscle memory and listen to the pulse of muscle memory bones. When my performanceis nearly finished, I reemergeas the interlocutorto bracketthe narratives told: Listen. Listen. What is it like to listen, deep inside my body? I will take your pulse and press it onto this magnetic tape. Will you wander? Will you waver? I will stand behindyou and hold you lightly in my arms with my voice... Until you rest, assured. Or not. I await your nervous laughter, a shift in your seat away from me, away from what we are here for. I. Will reel you in with my eyes, my voice, my will to hear what is unsaid, what must be said, what is said in that taut muscle, that sagging cheek, that viral eye. Trustme. Trustme. Who are you? Who are you? Who you are.13
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My bracketing text frames the interview excerpts. The audience encounters me first as an interlocutor between themselves and the dance. Subsequently,my dancing body layers additionaloral historynarratorsonto that first impression. This choreographicdevice allows the interlocutorand narrators to embed and reembed themselves within the audience's memory of the work as it unfolds. This practice is often deliberatein the temporalarts. An initial event introduces the performance and then serves to frame the rest of the work as a kind of performance pentimento with which subsequent events and charactersmust interact. This aspect of the choreographycites the Bakhtiniantheory of utterancedefined earlier, fulfilling the criterionof shared logic between oral history and the performance. Muscle Memory further emphasizes the emergentdialogic process of oral historyinterviews by introducing and then creating a fictional dialogue between two narrators. Eighty-fouryears old Eve Gentry and twentyeight years old Frank Everett were separated by nearlysixty yearsof life experienceand they snared their lives with two separate LEGACY interviewers. While recorded separately,both life histories share common themes including familyrejectionof their dancing, leavinghome under duress, and moving to San Franciscoto find inspiration. To illustrate these common themes in Muscle Memory, I traced Eve and Frank's early years one at a time. I first tell Eve's longer life story and then Frank's life, unfortunatelycut short by AIDS, is recounted second. After introducing the narrators' common themes in separate solo turns, I then constructed an explicitly fictional dialogue between Frank and Eve, one that never happened. By then, I have hinted a different purpose for this section because it should be clear to audiences that such a dialogue could not have occurred because of obvious age differences and geographic locations. My emphasis has shifted from the exegesis of actual life-stories to focusing on dialogue as a rhetoricalgenre. In this way, I point directlyto the dialogics of both dance and oral history means.To illustratethis throughchoreographic strategy,the following example describes how that fictional conversationdeveloped. I created the spoken dialogue from verbatim transcript excerpts, chosen carefully to construct an interaction that didn't exist in each document alone. To accomplish a coherent yet fictional dialogue, I developed links between the two life-histories using their shared themes described above as cues for generating the 'conversation.' The following

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Germandance. She invited me to visit her class [....] So I came to visit her class and I walked in the studio and in the class there were, I think, four or five girls in brief shorts and a little bra. Bare midriff. Bare legs. And the only boy, Welland Lathrop, in the class, had only a jock strap on and those pale white legs. I was so shocked. When I got home my brotherand sister-inlaw said, 'Well, how did you like it?' I said, 'I didn'tlike it.' Prissylittle me. Littleballerina with her ballet tutu and toe shoes. Anna Mundstockasked me back and she invited me to take a lesson. My brother said, 'Go back and take a lesson. See how you like the lesson.' So I went back [with] no tutu, no tights, no toe shoes. I don't know what I wore but [I did have bare feet]. I didn'thave a bare midriff,I'm sure. I was used to going around barefooted. I lived barefootedat home. It didn'ttake but ten minutes [of the class] for me to change my mind because I was allowed to improvise and that's what I loved.14 In contrast,I developed FrankEverett'srole in the fictional dialogue from three different sections of his oral history.In the first section, we hear about Frank'searly travailsin professional dance: Frank Everett: I had never done and/or seen Nutcracker before I joined the Oakland Ballet, right? So here, the first year we do our whole season and everything's tra-la-la and then we go, 'Okay, we're going to startNutcrackerrehearsals.' And I'm like, 'Okay, well, I mean, I've heard of Nutcracker, of course, but I've never seen it.' [...] What they do is have several casts, so everybody's alternating and doing different things, so you have to learn most of the ballet, right? It's a lot to learn [....] I have maybenine differentparts I have to learn and I'm like, 'Oh, my god, what's going on?' They start going to rehearsaland I start learning these different parts and I don't know what order they go in, right? [...] Everybodyassumes that I've done Nutcrackera hundredtimes and I know the music: 'Of course, if you'rehere with us, you've done it and you know it and, what's the big deal, you just have to learn the different choreography, you know.' I had no idea. I don't know what steps go with what music. [...] (Laughs) I'mjust tryingto fake my way throughthis! Hoping that God is going to get me through this. And then they turn on the divertissementmusic and someone says to

Eve Gentry performing Ground Hog Hunt (NYC premiere, 1945). Costume by Helen Frank, Music: folksong from South Carolina. Photo: Bruce Gentry. Despite attempts we have been unable to locate the owner of of this the copyright image but would be pleased to acknowledge them if they could contact us

text is directly excerpted from Eve Gentry's as a samplefrom originaloral historytranscript which the performeddialogue is constructed: Eve Gentry: Because I'd become such a problem for my parents about wanting to dance, my brother David, his wife Helen, my sister Charlotte, who was a dentist in San Francisco, talked to our parents and said, 'Why don't you let her come to San Francisco? She can live with Helen and David, and Charlottewill train her to be a dentist'sassistant.' When I went to San Francisco I [thought] I'd take ballet there. I knew Muriel Stuart, who was a Balanchine dancer in those days, was teaching in San Francisco. She was a beautiful woman, beautifuldancer.I watched her dance. Very fine teacher. So I thought, 'Well, I'll go study with Muriel Stuart. I'll look over other studios.' But my brother and sister-in-law had a friend by the name of Anna Mundstock from Germany who taught the modern

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Eve Gentry in Antenna Bird: A Figment of Natural Science (NYC, 1965). Choreography and costume design by Eve Gentry (19551 costume construction by Anna Hill Johnstone, music by Henry Brant. Photo: Bruce Gentry

me, 'You're supposed to be on the other side.' And I'm like, 'I am?' 'Yeah! Get on the other side!'15 A few pages later in Frank's oral history transcript,he backtracksto confess a conscious omission: FrankEverett:Oh, I want to say something that relatesto [our] last taping. I didn'ttalk about something and I didn't talk about it on purpose, but I want to insert it because I feel it's very important.If someone's taking the time to actually read my oral history then they're truly interested in my life and what made it the way it was. Last week I talkedabout a point, when I had moved and I was living in San Francisco,where I had no job and I had no place to live and I had kind of reachedbottom. At that point, what I did was, I prostitutedmyself. I worked on Polk Street as a hustler [...] it didn't last very long, maybe two months perhaps. Then I met this man who was a regular customer and he took me into his home. He was like my sugar daddy for a while, but I reallycouldn'tdeal with that so I finally got a job and stayed with another friend of mine [....] JeffFriedman:Youchose to do that workas a way of earning enough money to live? Frank Everett: Yeah, to eat and then to eventually try to find a place to live. I was kind of on the street. I would stay with different people and things. I had my stuff at one place and then I would go back there and sleep and stuff like that. Or, if I'd tricked ([someone] pick me up), I would spend the night there. A lot of times I did that. I would spend the night, even though I don't think they were really interested in that, you know? (Laughs) But I had no place to go. I was still taking [dance] class. Ironically, I would get up in the morning and I would go and get my dance clothes from my friend's house. I would [...] take a couple classes a day. I was still doing that.16 Finally, an additional excerpt was used to create the final version of my fictionaldialogue: FrankEverett:In the balletworld [...] you'd put on a mask and you go out on stage and you move your limbs and [...] you're either pretty or you're happy. The roles are so limitingin what you can express,which was a big disappointmentto realize that

I didn't want to really do ballet. I didn't reallywant to go out and do all these tricks and have a smile on my face, when reallyit was arduous. (Laughs) All I really wanted to do was move and express, through my body and my face.17 The text that follows is my fictionaldialogue between Frank and Eve, constructed across time and space. In the performance of this dialogue, I assigned each character a location within the stage space: Eve is established stage left; Frankanchors stage right. Consequently, the solo performer must physically transit between both spatial locations, alternately occupying each character's persona as it is cued by text. I began with their shared themes of what sort of 'day job' might support their explorations of dance in San Francisco,Eve in 1929 and Frank in the early 1980s. At moments when both Eve and Frank were shocked by breaches in their expectations of the dance world, I deliberatelyperformed both text and

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Eve Gentry:(Rolling on the floor towards stage left) ...from Anna Mund stock who taught the German modern dance. There were four or five girls in the class, bare midriffs, bare legs and Welland Lathrop, the only boy wearing only a jockstrapand those pale white legs... Eve Gentry/Frank Everett: (Jumping the centre line:) I was shocked! Frank Everett: (Racing stage right) I'd never seen or danced in a Nutcracker before I joined Oakland Ballet. (As his colleagues:) 'We assumed he'd done it a hundredtime before.' (As himself, circling stage left:) I was just tryingto fake my way through it. (As his colleagues:) 'You'reon the wrong side of the stage.' (Dartingstage right) In ballet, I'd put on a mask and be either pretty or happy. Eve Gentry:(Dartingstage left) Prissylittle me, in my ballet tutu and pointe shoes. (Fallingto the ground and rolling towards centre stage) But I went back to Anna Mundstock and it didn't take but ten minutes for me to changemy mind; (sitting up, down stage centre) we were allowed to improvise. Frank Everett/Eve Gentry: (Down stage centre, reaching right and then left, then receding back along the centre line of the stage:)All I ever wanted to do was to move and expressthroughmy body and my face.18 movement centre stage, straddlingboth stage worlds for a moment before dartingfrom stage left to stage right. Finally,closing this fictional dialogue, I again claim centre, since I feel both Eve and Frankhad come to separatebut shared epiphanies about what contemporary dance offered them. I have parenthesized director's notes to show both the intentionsof the speakerand my choreographed movements in the scripted dialogue: Eve Gentry: (Beginning upstage centre, speaking as her brother:) 'Charlotte will teach her to be a dental assistant.' (Eve circling stage left, as herself:) I thought I'd take ballet class from Muriel Stuart, a Balanchine dancer teaching class in San Francisco. Frank Everett: (Lunging stage right) I worked on Polk Street as a hustler, to eat. I'd trick, get up, get my clothes from a friend'shouse and take class... As the two narratorsspatiallyconverge and diverge, the audience begins to watch for messageson two separatelevels. choreographic First, on the macro level, my choreography points out how both narratorsshared important themes on artistic development. On the micro level, each narrator embeds interior dialogue within their narrative.Eve speaks as her well-meaning sister Charlotte and then answers Charlotte's(boring) plans for a career in dentistry with her own more radical idea. Frankembeds fellow dancers' perspectives on his debut performancein the Nutcrackerand then internally admits his ignorance. In this section of Muscle Memory, I have framed dialogue at both the macro and micro levels to explicitly call audiences' attention to dialogue as a rhetorical genre rather than only a container for narrating events. While I don't explicitly cite Bakhtin, I deliberately constructed an artistic effect to evoke metacommentary on dialogue itself as a theme in Muscle Memory.

Frank Everett, candid studio photograph. Photo: Steve Savage

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RECONSTRUCTING MEMORY TOWARDS FORM Muscle Memory also supports another metalevelof dialogue,the proactiveinteraction between choreography and the audience. As mentioned above, audiences for dance are called upon to exercise their temporal reception of dance, as it unfolds in time. In contrast to the spatialarts of painting,sculptureand the like where art objects remainstationaryallowing for relaxed contemplation, dance is dynamic. As dance writer Myron Nadel notes in his text The Dance Experience: The performingarts happensequentiallyin time [....] Audiencesin the performingarts are always in the midst of an experience. The moment a shape, sound or action is seen, heard or felt, it is over, and the next shape, sound or action comes into the moment called 'now.'The performingarts, then, are forms being made [....] similarto life itself - impermanent,fleeting and illusory [....] The performance of an entire dance is comparableto an art object, but it is a virtual, not an actual product. It no longer exists after it has been performed, except in one's memory.19 As Nadel makes clear, performance requires audience members to use their memories to perceive the dance as an art 'form*. In Muscle Memory,I have employedchoreographic strategies to make explicit this process of audience memory retrieval and interpretation during performance. This process models the same logic in oral history interviews, as the narratorretrievesmemories and then constructs a form called 'the interI used repeview' over time. As choreographer, titions of spatial design and iconic gestures to stimulate and support this memory reconstruction process. Each repetition gives the audience a chance to remember familiar instances and to begin constructing a formal containerfor the performanceevent. I call this process 're-membering,' maintaining etymological ties to the corporeal roots of memory, that is, muscle memory itself. For example, much of Eve's narrativestyle was discursive. She linked elements in her life story in an associative manner, one after the other. To mirrorEve's discursive style choreographically,I created a rather random spatial floor pattern for my movement. I tell Eve's story with full body movements, gestures, and language following a zig-zag spatial pattern. However, midway through performing Eve's story, I return to my original starting location and repeat my movement along the same
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spatial pathway. The difference is that Eve's narrative does not repeat but continues to evolve, but layered over familiargestures and spatial design. For audiences, what emerges is a set of surprisejuxtapositions:the layeringof new text over a substrate of familiar movements through space. This strategy strives to make explicit the process of memory reconstruction. By going over familiarground, audiences gradually construct the dance's choreographicform as it unfolds over time. For example, during the first half of Eve's story,she demonstratesa ratherpoorly danced version of Pavlova'sDying Swan in reference to the amateurishballet training she received as a child. As Eve, I slowly bend over an extended leg, fluttering my arms like wings, while tucking another leg under myself. I repeat this familiar,iconic dance gesture later in the second half of Eve's narrative, but located at a different place in her story. The second time this iconic gesture occurs, Eve now discusseshow she nevercalled her parents to tell them she was staying overnight sixty miles away from home to pursue her training in Los Angeles: Soon, I was staying over Sundaysin order to take another class on Monday.I didn't phone my parents; you didn't use the phone that way. Someone had to die (fluttering slowly to the floor as the dying 'Swan') in order to make a long-distance phone call.20 What does my choreographic repetition accomplish? The first juxtaposition of the dying swan gesture with text on Eve's bad ballet trainingcites a certain cultural context: Pavlovawas one of those rare, popularfigures in the ballet world during the early twentieth century who inspired many often unqualified teachers of ballet in the 'culturally deprived' hinterlands. In the second juxtaposition, we see and understandEve's reference to historical attitudes towards death and dying, the value of new technologies such as phone systems, and immigrants' reluctance to use those technologies for financial and social reasons. My deliberateintent was encouragingaudiences to layerone instancewith the other,with at least two effects. First,audiencesconsciously construct a memory based on formal elements in the temporalperformance.In this way, they proactivelydevelop a dialogicrelationshipwith the choreography.Second, juxtaposing these two instances also creates imagistic synthesis, enablinga richerculturalanalysisof Eve'slife. At a time when Pavlova's nineteenth century

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aestheticand the advancesof twentiethcentury technologycoexisted, what can we learn? Eve was a child of immigrants,an individualbody subject to those same contrarian pressures: Europeans from an old-world culture, represented by Pavlova, were displaced into America's new world full of technological opportunitiesand anxieties.In this way,performances of Muscle Memory achieve the same functionas Fabian'sexampledescribedearlier: an embodied enactment of Eve's character becomes more engaged with her own historical matrix,clarifyinga rich moment less accessible as text alone. I use the same choreographic strategy for the second character in Muscle Memory. At twenty-eight, Frank was already diagnosed with AIDS when I interviewedhim. We knew each other well, touring the United States and then abroadwith the same dance companyfor several years. Frankwas a brash, in-your-face personality,markedby a short temper.Due to his illness and personality style, we recorded Frank's oral history in short bursts of high energy measured by bouts of rest. In Muscle MemoryI recreatedthese conditions by editing his text into short sentences, even fragments.I also borrowed an iconic gesture from Frank, finger snaps from his own gesture repertory.21 Similarto Eve'scase describedabove, I repeat Frank's fingersnaps severaltimes in the choreography and, because of their juxtapositions with new text, each gesture functions in multiple ways throughouthis narrative. For example, I trace Frank'svarious coping mechanisms for his early dysfunctional home life choreographicallythrough snap gestures throughout the dance. In the performance script, Frank begins his narrative with an insouciantdeclaration: I was seventeen. I grew up mostly in New Hampshire.Kindofabackwardsplace. Not sure which I saw first: Fame or All That Jazz,but whicheverI saw first, I thoughtto myself, 7 can do that' (finger snap). Frank's finger snap gesture is defiant. family,Frankbelieves Despite his dysfunctional deeply he can muster a functional performing career. In the performance script, Frank also discusseshis family'sdifficultieswith an absent and violent father: My sister and I, we made dinner and just hung out. Sometimes our father would come over and brings us money for food. Once he broughta gun. 'Go ahead' (snap), 'do it!' (snap, snap). 'Do it.' (Snap) 'You're an awful (snap, snap) man. DO IT!'22

I accentuated the fragmented rhythms of Frank'sverbal delivery choreographically by insertinga nervous tic, finger snaps developing into the sound of a trigger clicking as Frank's fatherpatheticallythreatenssuicide in front of his children. I used these iconic gestures variously to declareFrank's youthfulignoranceand arrogance, display his justifiable rage over a father's suicidal threats, and finally, to reveal his deep longing for more time to live, discussed below. All three are indices of Frank'stemperament and his narrative style. Iconic gestures attached to each episode and their resonating emotional tone allow audiences multiple opportunities to recognize themselves constructing a story about Frank through somatic memory retrieval. What can we learn about Frank?He was a volatile individual, troubled by setbacks throughout his short life. We also learn that, while he suffered, Frankaccumulated coping mechanisms by maintaining his confidence, expressinghis anger,and finallyhis sadness.As the embodied gestures accumulate, Frank's short life takes on dimension. Rather than remaininga burstof unrelatedout-takes,Frank becomes a full-bodied persona worth remembering. In both cases described above, I employed choreographic strategies carefully to support the audience'sproactivedialogic productionof meaning. By focusing on memoryretrievaland gradually layering that data towards threedimensional form, whether choreographic or as narrative,I have linked the logics of performance and oral history interviews. PERFORMINGA NEW THEORYOF INTRASUBJECTIVITY My last example introduces a new theory of intrasubjectivity. Besides the intersubjective participationof the narratorand interviewer,I suggest there is an additional layer of subjectivity embedded in the interview process. As mentionedearlier,historianshad often rejected oral testimony as invalid evidence because of its supposed unreliability. However,theoretical shifts regardingthe natureof historicalinquiry challenged this presumption, often fueled by feminist oral historians including Sherna BergerGluck and Daphne Patai,et al; feminist historiansKathrynAnderson,Susan Armitage, Joan Sangster and Ann Oakley; literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith; and sociologists including Judith Wittner, Michal M. McCall and Wendy Joneswithin the symbolic interactionist school. These authors among others posit that, rather than reject subjective constructionsof meaning in oral history interviews, this protean quality contains important
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data in and of itself. According to McCalland Winner's article, 'The Good New About Life History/ the asymmetrical power relation between researcherand narratoris central to this conflict. When the narrator's life-story functions for the sole purpose of an (often academic, often male) interviewer'sresearch, this sort of inquirydenies the narrator's potential use of the information themselves. Feminists claim instead that the interview process often functionsas an internallyvalid process of self-actualizationfor the narrator.23 As authors Richard Ochberg and George Rosenwaldpoint out in their text The Cultural

constructing a single, high-velocity intrasubjective soliloquy. First, I selected one of Frank'sstories from the original oral history transcriptthat reveals intense desire, graphicallyphysical in description. In this text, Frankdescribes his dramatic of a dance: performance I got to do this solo in Rooms that was by Anna Sokolow.I was reallyhappyto be able to do that[....] Each solo had a theme and the theme that I did was 'Panic';and so I was just panic-stricken[....] I tried so hard to findpanicand expresspanicand I felt like I came close a few times and such and then in the performance,I was panic-stricken. I mean, it took me over and I actually,at one triedto calm point duringthe performance, myself down because I was really freaking out! I don'twhat happened,but I got a nosebleedduringthe solo and I didn'teven know it. I came offstage after the solo and I felt somethingon my face and I wiped and I had blood all over the side of my nose. I don't know if the audiencecould see. I don'tthink so, but - God, I must have really been panickedto [get] a nosebleed! It was wild; that was very satisfying,to feel like I really capturedsomethingreal.25 Laterin his career,Frankwas askedto create a new solo fromscratch with ourdancecompany. Sadly,it would be Frank'slast work before he retiredon disability benefitdue to his AIDSdiagnosis. His memoriesof creatingand performing this workwere also graphically intense: found a piece of music [Thechoreographer] she wanted to use: Mozart'sConcertoin D Minor.Sweet Williamwas what [the dance] was called. It's about ten minutes long and it'sin threesections[....] Mostof it was hard dancingand therewas a whole sectionin the middle, maybe three minutes long or so, where the music just explodes and she had this idea that she wanted it to go into the ground during this period. So it was three or four minutes of floor work that came up and out of the ground and into jumps! You'd be rolling aroundon the floor doing all this really hard floor work and God! I came up with the craziestthings! [...] The structure of the dancewas the dancer startedin a veryrelaxedpose upstageleft in a spot and just slowly came alive or awake [....] Then it went throughthe whole piece and the very end was a long kind of sweeping, but not quick, diagonalthat went from down stage left to upstage right where he just did these small gesturesagainwhile he

Politics of Self-Understanding,these two

outcomes, gathering data and self-actualization, are often contradictory. According to the authors, oral testimonies often reveal a silent struggle between the informant'slived experience and what they perceiveas the researcher's call for so-called 'official knowledge' elicited through perceived power: [D]esire strains against these forms [of official knowledge]. The silences, truncations, and confusions in stories as well as the occasional outbreak of action contradicting an individual's official narrative, point out to us, and to the narrator,if only his or her recognitioncan be enlisted, what else might be said and sought.24 When a narrator's actualexperiencereaches extremedifferencefrom the official story he or she believesthe researcher wants to hear,delivery of the story often fragments.I suggest that, where narrativesare broken by verbal silence, embodied aspects of oral narratives are revealed. In this process of fragmentationand revelation there is a phenomenon of intrasubjective dialoguewithin a single subject,in addition to the dialogue between narrator and is revealedin interviewer. This intrasubjectivity the differing, often contradictory messages from a single subjectrevealedby fragmentation of their semantic text and the emergence of embodied signals. Intrasubjectivityframes my final example where I have created another fictive performance event exploring this theory. Because I have deliberatelyframedMuscle Memorywith my own role of 'the listener,'I am conscious of colonizing my narrators, appropriating their power to speak for themselves. To undercut this possibility,I have deliberatelyfragmented the narrativeat a crucial point in the performance to reveal Frank'sdesire to self-actualize through our interviewing process. To accomplish this task, I intercut severalexcerpts from Frank's oral history transcript towards
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was walking off stage and reaching back, but lookingforward.26 In a third excerpt, Frankdescribeshis final of that solo. Whilemechanpublicperformance ically producing a virtuoso physical performance, Frankwas also aware of his illness, his decision to retire and his ultimatelytruncated life span. Contemplating his own personal mortality,this was the last work Frankwould performas a professionaldancer: I think I startedout with [the dance] being kind of a journey; once we finished it, dealingwith some kind of internalturmoil [....] But it changed and I felt that it was dealing with my death. And so that'swhat it became for me. It became knowing- the beginningof the piece was me knowingthat I was going to die and knowing that I was going to have to face leaving my life [....] Then the mid-section where it was very intenseand thrashing,for me, was tryingto fight it and tryingto come to grips with it and deal with it. And then the end section was leaving,leavingmy life and going on to whatever it is that I'll go on to [....] What more can you ask for, but to have that kind of vehicle.That'swhat you hope for all your life, to reallyexpressin yourart form something that means somethingto you personally,or politically[....]27 To create the my intrasubjective soliloquy,I appropriated this last double-consciousness narrative becauseit alreadyrevealsa conflicted internaldialogue. I then intercut that complex earlieraccountof working accountwith Frank's on the 'Panic' solo. Finally, to complete the script for Muscle Memory,I again intercutthe combined dance descriptions with a story of own life-history, panic from Frank's waking up paralyzedfrom the waist down and his frantic trip to the hospital: One morningI woke up and I was layingin bed and I went to get out of bed and I couldn'tmove my leg at all [...] and I knew I had to go to the doctor'sand I had to go now [....] So I got my right leg off of the bed, but I couldn't move my left and I couldn'tmove my left arm and was reaching across tryingto get my left leg over, but I was so weak and sick for so long that I had no strengthin my bodyat all [...] so I couldn't even get my leg over the side of the bed to try and stand up. At this point, my mother was stayinghere. So I tried yelling and she didn't hear me, of course she was asleep [....] I went to stand up and I fell

down and I stood up and I fell down and finallyI got on my feet and dragged-[...] It was like The Mummy. I went to her room and knocked on the door and she said, 'What? What is it?' I said, 'I have to go to the hospitaland I have to go now' [....] So we're on our way.It was reallyintense because [...] she hadn'tbeen here very long and she didn'tknow her way aroundthe city.I broughta bag to throwup in because I had been still throwingup for days. We're driving and all of a sudden I lost any connection to my surroundings.I had absolutely no idea where I was [....] I think we were on 24th Street Fortunately, going towards Castro, right? [...] So we went over Castro [Street] and then across Market [Street] and I'm going, 'I don't know where I am, Mom, I have no idea where I am' [....] Then at - near Henry [Street] or something like that, she pulled over because I started throwing up [....] I just startedcrying,bawlinglike a baby and she startedcryingand I turnedto her and I said, 'Please don't let them hook me up to machines, I don't want to live like that. Let me die if that'swhat it comes to.' I said, 'I don't want to just be on machines.'28 My strategyof intercuttingall three stories raises the stakes of interiorfragmentation even furtherto makemy choreographic processmore these three storiesalso explicit.Simultaneously, tracea trajectory of Frank's fromhis physicality, early joy of complete kinetic immersion, to a matureconsciousnessof his own mortallimitations throughdancing,and finally,those corporeal limitationsas they directlyimpingedon his physicalitythroughparalysis. I selected the final lines for this section's performance scriptfromour last recordedinterview: Thinkingof ourfour interviews -just thinking back, is there anything you would like to add? Justreallya quote from a movie: 'Live,live, live!' And that's from Auntie Mame. It's a wonderfulmovie about - living life. Justdo it! That'sthe most importantthing,is just to live your life. Thankyou, Frank! (Laughs)I guess it'sover!!! (In a sillyvoice:) I don't want it to be over!29 I demonstrate the fragmentation of this scripted narrativein Muscle Memorythrough
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of both semantictext repetitionand intercutting and choreographic gestures. Where the text fragments, embodied gestures become foregrounded. My purpose here is to emphasise how we must account for multiple channels of communication, including embodied signals, for achievingnuanced analysisand interpretation of oral historynarratives.Especiallywhen fragmentationoccurs in the oral historynarrative, the embodied signalsthat remaincommunicate expressions of the narrator'sformerly occluded desire. In a performance,ratherthan detach and create an asymmetryof power by objectifying and isolating the narrator as a subject of their gaze, audiences are compelled to stay in dialogic relation to the self-actualizing subject. In the script below I have distinguished between the original excerpts through indentations. I added some repetitions and additional extrapolations to create or dramatize transitions as needed. Try reading all the way through and then re-read the texts separately as whole narrativeson their own. As Frank,I begin: I finally got to do a solo (relaxinginto his chair). Each solo had a theme and the theme I did was... for air) 'Panic' (Graspingtheatrically I triedso hardto express (repeatedgesture) 'PANIC. Finally:somethingreal. I couldn't Panic (gesture) took me over... get my leg over the side of the bed. MOM?(A startledpostureshiftforward:) I have to go to the hospitaland I have to go now... I'm into a section in the middle that went down stage left to upstageright... (pause) The car lurched forward (repeated postureshift). I had no idea where I was. Up and over the hills, over Castro,across Market.I was lost... ...jumping and falling, up and out of the groundand into the air. I crumpledup the paperbag I broughtto throw up in (slicing gesture across stomach).(Repeatedpostureshift:)Mom handledthe car...

...aswe tumbledour way stageright,flex the foot. Feel the heel work its way into the floor.Stop. Look. Nowhere looks right. (Repeatedpanicky gesture,this time for real:)Don't let them put me on machines,please don't put me on machines, I can't live on machines... (Fallingto the floor) ...the street tilts, the floor slides away, the legs shift like a knifecuttingthrougha paper slicinggesture).We'renearing bag (repeated the end of a rather short composition. Sweep a last diagonal,up and over the curb, onto the sidewalk.Weaveeach gesturecarefully over a shadowed brow. The Mozart swells... (Risingto stand) I'm leavingmy life. With a glance, walk out slowly, reaching back, facing forward. Backing out. Face forward (turning slowly on a pivot away from the audience). It'sover (turningaway). (Nearlyturned:) I don'twant it to be over. (Facingaway,a swiftlydartingarm,straightto the ceiling: fingersnap).30 In Frank'sfinal finger snap gesture, audiences experience a convergence in the finality of closure, of both this intense solo excerptbut also of Frank's own life. By using his iconic finger snap gesture, I cause audiences to rememberthat insouciant, arrogant,ignorant, intensely alive Frank from earlier sections of Muscle Memory.The juxtapositionof life lived intensely in contrast to its finitude brings Muscle Memorysimultaneouslyinto focus and createsdepth of field. Frommy own experience performingthis section of MuscleMemory,the and repetiuse of fragmentation choreographic tion doesn'tas much occlude Frankas it reveals a single moment'ssharp a kind of hyper-reality: focus embedded within the depth of an entire life that led to that moment; Frank'sdesire for self-actualization,the raging desire of life for continuityunderextremecircumstances.I have tried to do Frankjustice; I hope I have. CONCLUDING REMARKS Choreographinga performancefrom primary oral sources provides opportunities for further research and complex interpretation of the oral history event. By addressing the temporal, contingent and embodied ways oral histories are produced, I have built and maintained dialogues between narratorsand inter-

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viewer, and between the choreography and the audience. In doing so, muscle memory itself is enacted, where that instinctive, visceral, yet elusive experience becomes the subject of performance.My new strategiesfor dancing oral history investigate how historiNOTES
1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, SilencingThePast: Powerand the Production of History,Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, p 29; p 162, fn 33. 2. WilliamButler Yeats,'Among in TheTower, New York: Schoolchildren', MacMillan, 1928. 3* Pierre Bourdieu,TheLogicof Practice,trans Richard CA: Stanford Nice, Stanford University Press, 1980, p 92. 4. PaulThompson,TheVoiceof the Past:Oral Oxford/NY: Oxford History,3rd Edition, Press,2000, p 56, quotingCharles University von Langlois and CharlesSeignobos, Introduction to the Studyof History, transG.G. New York: Barnesand Berry,1898; reprint Noble, 1966, pi 7. 5. Georg Iggersand Konrad von Moltke, introduction to Leopoldvon Ranke:TheTheory and Practice of History,by Leopoldvon Ranke, trans.Wilma A. Iggersand Konrad von Moltke, von Moltke(eds), Georg Iggersand Konrad 1973, p ix. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis: 6* Iggersand Moltke,p Ixvii. Reader: 7. PamMorris(ed), TheBakhtin Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and London: Voloshinov, Arnold, 1994, p44, A Critical Freudianism: quotingV.N. Voloshinov, edited in collaboration Sketch,transI.R.Titunik, with N. H. Bruss,Bloomington IN: Indiana Press, 1987, no page cited. University 8* Erving Goffman, Behaviorin PublicPlaces, New York: Glencoe FreePress, 1963, p 14. C. Fine, TheFolklore Text: From 9 Elizabeth IN: University Performance to Print, Bloomington, of IndianaPress, 1984. I O.Johannes Fabian, Powerand Performance: ethnographic exploration through proverbial wisdom and theaterin Shaba Zaire,Madison, Wl: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, p6. 1 1 Formore information on LEGACY'S mission, contactSan and collectionmaterials, programs

cal events are embodied in individual subjects. Mobilizing how bodies speak to history through performance then works towards rehabilitating embodied experience in the construction and interpretation of history, a re-membering.
22. Friedman,1994, np. 23. See, among others,ShernaGluck,'What's So Special AboutWomen? Women'sOral vol 7, no 2, 1977, pp 3-14; Frontiers, History', ShernaBerger-Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women'sWords:TheFeminist Practice of Oral New York/London: Press, History, Routledge 1991 ; Kathryn Andersonet al, 'Beginning Where We Are:Feminist Methodologyin Oral Oral History Review,vol 15, Spring History', 1987, ppl 03-1 27; SusanArmitage,'TheNext vol 8, no 2, 1983, pp 3-8; Joan Step,' Frontiers, Debates Songster,TellingOur Stories:Feminist and the Use of Oral History', in R. Perks and A. (eds), TheOral History Reader, Thompson London/New York: Routledge,1998, pp 87Women: A 100; AnnOakley, 'Interviewing in terms',in H. Roberts Contradiction (ed), Doing Feminist and Kegan Research,London: Routledge Paul, 1981; BarbaraHerrstein Smith,'Narrative Narrative in IraKonigsberg Versions, Theories', Inthe PostStructuralist (ed), AmericanCriticism Ml: MichiganStudiesin the Age, AnnArbor, 198 1, pp 162-1 86; MichalM. Humanities, McCall and Judith The Good New Wittner, in HowardS. Beckerand AboutLife History', MichalM. McCall (eds), SymbolicInteraction and Cultural Studies,Chicago/London:University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp 56-58; and Wendy Jones, 'Newcomer'sBiographical Explanations: The Self as Adjustment Process',Symbolic vol 3, 1980, pp 83-94. Interaction, 24. George C. Rosenwaldand Richard TheCultural Politics of Ochberg, StoriedLives: New Haven/London:Yale Understanding, Press, 1992, p 7. University 23. Everett,1993, p 29. 26. Everett,1993, pp 46-47. 27. Everett,1993, pp 47-48. 28. Everett,1993, pp 63-64. 29. Everett,1993, p 69. 30. Friedman,1994, np.

FranciscoPerforming ArtsLibrary & Museum, website www.sfpalm.org/programs/legacy. 12. Sally Banes and Noel Carroll,'Dance and and Spectacle in the UnitedStates in the Eighties Nineties', in Sally Banes (ed),WritingDancing in the Age of Postmodernism, Wesleyan University Pressof New England,Hanover Press/University and London,1994, p 335. 1 3* Muscle Memory.JeffFriedman (choreographer/ed), 1994. Unpublished performance script.Allsubsequentcitationsof the performance scriptare fromthe same work. 1 4* Interview with EveGentry,with interviewer and editorMercy Sidbury,1991 , LEGACY Oral San FranciscoPerforming Arts History Program, & Museum,transcript Library pp 12-14. For more information, contactsfpalm.orgforaccess to on-linecatalogue. with Frank 1 3. Interview with Everett, interviewer and editorJeffFriedman,1993, LEGACY Oral History San Francisco Program, ArtsLibrary & Museum,transcript Performing pp 27-28. 16. Everett,1993, p 31. 1 7. Everett,1993, p 29. 18. Friedman,1994, np. I MyronHoward Nadel, 'Dance, Music and Theaterin Theoryand Practice',in Myron Howard Nadel and Marc Raymond Strauss into (eds), TheDance Experience: Insights Culture and Creativity, Princeton, NJ: History, Princeton BookCompany, 2003, pp 272-3. 20. Friedman,1994, np. with the 'snap queen' 21 Forthose unfamiliar and his/her gesturalvocabulary,runout and see TonguesUntied(1989), a filmproduced by and AfricanAmericanperformer and filmstarring makerMarlonRiggsand directedby poet Essex Inthe film,Riggsgives a now classic Hemphill. lectureon 'snapology,'describingvarious of the African Americandrag significations queen'sfingersnap vocabulary.

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