Oral History and Performance in the Classroom

Abstract

If asked to describe a history seminar at the senior undergraduate or graduate level, I don’t think anyone in my discipline would have imagined a dance studio with hardwood floors, mirrored walls, or floor-to-ceiling windows that cover an entire wall. Nor would they have imagined a classroom where students and faculty communally set-up and take-down the tables and chairs eachweek, sitting instead on foam mats in a big circle. I also doubt they would have expected to see students engaged in song, dance, and improvisational exercises such as the “Fantasy Machine” where one person enters our big circle and begins to do a repetitive movement.One by one, others join in until everyone is a cog in this gloriously strange and silly machine. Yet this is precisely what a group of twenty-six history and theatre students enrolled in Concordia University’s inaugural “oral history and performance” course did over an eight month period.