(Re)making a Story: Oral History in Academia and Theater
April 23, 2018 / 9.00 am – 7.30 pm
Welcome to participate in the one-day oral history workshop hosted by the Center for Urban History.
Conversations with the eye-witnesses are sources for work and inspiration both for academics and for representatives of a documentary theater. Both these milieus are using their own set of methods and offers their own interpretations targeting their own audiences. The workshop’s objective is to highlight the opportunities for cooperation between oral history in its academic and artistic dimensions. It would be illustrated based on the example of "Lviv Theatres after 1945" collection of interviews. The topic offered for discussion is connected with the space: stage-set, theatrical, and urban. We shall use the interview materials to search for the answers about how representatives of Lviv theaters construct their own perceptions of places (both physical and imaginary), how they establish links between a theater and a city, and also which means they used or are still using to produce a unique environment of the stage for different performances. This focused approach will help us take a more detailed look at the peculiarities of interpretations, and also specific forms to represent the results depending on the "lens" you take.
The workshop will include a theoretical and a practical part. During the first part, participants will be taking lectures from the guest experts – Inga Kozlova and Joanna Wichowska. The experts will be talking about the tools to work with oral histories used by academic researchers and representatives of a documentary theater and the theater of witness. The second part will relate to analysis of the recorded interviews and to drafting a concept for group projects. The workshop will conclude in the presentation of group ideas and their further discussion.
The workshop is eligible for students, junior research fellows, actors, directors, playwrights, and anyone dealing with testimonies and memory related topics, or the urban space issues.
About the experts:
Joanna Wichowska
is a theater critic and curator, a performer. She did theater studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, worked as an actress and a trainer at independent theaters (such as the Gardzenice theater and the Double Edge, USA). As a dramaturge, she worked with such directors as Oliver Frljic, Wojtek Klemm, Agnieszka Blonska, and Rosa Sarkisian. Curator of projects East European Performing Arts Platform (2012-2015), and a Polish-Ukrainian performative project “Maps of Fear/Maps of Identity” (2015-2016). Co-curator (jointly with Rosa Sarkisian) of the first runs of Ukrainian independent theaters “DESANT.UA” in Warsaw (2017).
Inga Kozlova
a Candidate in Sociology, Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2010, she received her Master’s degree in Sociology (Ivan Franko National University in Lviv); in 2015, she defended her thesis on “Changes in Social Space of a Contemporary Ukrainian City Resulting from Tourist Practices” at the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine; she has run and coordinated a series of qualitative research jointly with the municipality and NGOs. Presently, she is engaged in the research of civic (re)making of spaces and coordinates the work of sociological laboratory at the Department of Sociology of UCU.
For more details, feel free to contact coordinator of "Urban Stories" oral history archive Natalia Otrishchenko at [email protected].
The workshop is part of the [un]archiving program. The program aims to promote collections of the Urban Media Archive. We intend to develop new attitudes towards the archiving practice and to present our collections from an untypical perspective. The events of the series include group film screenings and listening to visual, audiovisual or audio pieces, as well working on the materials collected by the Center that would combine popular formats and archival historical collections in the setting of free reflection and discussion.
Credits
Сover Image: Collection of Tetyana Orlenko / Urban media archive