Type: Presentation · Oral History
Date: 17 October 2019
Context: Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Pathways in the Field: Considerations for those Working In, On, and Around Oral History
Location: Sheraton Salt Lake City Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
Panel: Oral History in Artistic Mediums
Role: Presenter · Researcher
Affiliation: FernUniversität in Hagen
Panel Participants:
Ricardo Viviani
Kenneth Horowitz
Daniel Horowitz Garcia
In the winter of 1980/81, I was awarded a scholarship to study at a dance studio located at 400 Lafayette Street in New York City. The name of this studio was Dancerschool. The studio was part of the life work of Dennis Wayne, a star dancer of the 1970s. His company was called “Dancers”, just the word “Dancers”. The simplicity of that name indicates that what they do should suffice.
The art speaks for itself.The title Just Call Us Dancers comes from this memory. It is therefore both a reference to that particular moment in my own formation and a question about what can be communicated by the practice itself, before it is translated into explanatory language.
Just Call Us Dancers — Oral History in the Performing Arts was a presentation about Ricardo Viviani’s pathway from dance and choreography into Oral History and about the methodological questions that arise when oral history is applied to a predominantly non-verbal art form.
The presentation was deliberately personal. Using slides that included images from Viviani’s early years as a dancer, it traced a path that began with his unexpected discovery of dance while studying Biology at the University of São Paulo. During university strikes, he encountered a dance group forming in the Faculty of Architecture (FAU). The group, composed of amateur dancers, chose the deliberately grand institutional name Corpos de Baile. What began as a moment of curiosity became a professional artistic trajectory.
A year or two later, Viviani entered the Escola de Comunicações e Artes — Escola de Arte Dramática (ECA-EAD) at the University of São Paulo to study Theatre Direction, as a dance programme was not available there in 1979. His teachers directed his attention toward non-verbal communication, giving him a way of thinking about performance beyond spoken language.
This formation took place during the Brazilian Military Regime. Viviani observed how music, theatre and dance could contain several layers of meaning and how artists developed forms capable of communicating around censorship. Learning to create and read these layers of meaning became useful to him as a choreographer and remained part of his artistic practice.
The presentation then followed the longer development of this interest: from early choreography and a continuing attention to non-verbal communication, through years of artistic practice and further study, to Viviani’s later decision to investigate these questions more systematically.
Alongside his work as a choreographer, Viviani returned to formal study through Cultural Sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) at FernUniversität in Hagen. He regarded this as continuing education rather than a break from his artistic practice. Through these studies he encountered Oral History and recognized a methodological correspondence with questions he had carried through his artistic life: how can knowledge embedded in lived practice be investigated, articulated and placed within a historical context?
The presentation argued that dancers can be unusually difficult interview subjects because dance contains forms of knowledge that are not primarily verbal. Studio communication can be pragmatic, affective, metaphorical and inseparable from movement. The challenge for the interviewer is therefore not simply to ask dancers to explain what they know, but to create conditions in which aspects of their experience can become narratable.
A related question concerned the role from which knowledge is acquired. In an institutional dance environment, dancers experience creative processes according to their position within the theatre structure. Their memories therefore contain not only individual recollection, but knowledge shaped by their particular role, relationships and responsibilities.
The presentation also introduced the idea that apparently simple biographical questions can open onto much wider historical contexts. A question such as “How did you start to dance?” may begin as a personal biography and lead toward histories of education, cultural identity, political circumstances and artistic formation. The interview becomes a space in which these unexpected connections can emerge.
One example from Viviani’s Oral History work concerns a dancer’s account of learning ballet in Dublin during the 1970s. What begins as a question about entering dance opens onto questions of cultural identity and the experience of studying ballet within a context shaped by the colonial relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Such moments demonstrate how the apparent simplicity of a life-history question can reveal wider historical structures.
The presentation therefore positioned Oral History not simply as a means of collecting memories, but as a form of inquiry in which the specific knowledge of the interviewer and the artistic field can help open questions that might otherwise remain inaccessible.
Archival Material:
Presentation slides; presentation PDF; conference programme; research notes; related Oral History interview material; documentation of subsequent work on non-verbal communication in interviewing.
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