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Philip Venables and Ted Huffman, Denis & Katya, London, Southbank Centre, Purcell Room, 13–14 March 2020

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2020

Extract

Oral history is experiencing something of a heyday in the public imagination. The past ten years have seen a proliferation of podcasts – Sarah Koenig's Serial, Brian Reed's S-Town, Jon Ronson's The Butterfly Effect – which revolve around the testimony of ordinary people. Many of their fictional counterparts, most overtly Archive 81, hinge around the very practice of documenting, archiving and interpreting oral histories. BBC radio's oral history The Century Speaks (1999) was broadcast to an audience of millions. In the same year, radio historian Susan Douglas presciently called for a return to orality: ‘a mode of communication reliant on storytelling, listening, and group memory’. Common to these cultural products is a desire to capture a zeitgeist in a peculiarly direct and interpersonal way: through the intimacy of hearing a witness's own voice, oral history media eludes writing and embraces the subjectivity of the spoken and unscripted. To listen to somebody's testimony is to foster a distinctive relationship with them and their past, to receive it in their words and in some sense relive it on their terms.

Type
FIRST PERFORMANCES
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 Douglas, Susan, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination from Amos ‘n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999), p. 29Google Scholar.

2 The US premiere was sung by Siena Licht Miller and Theo Hoffman.

3 Shannon Eblen, ‘He Clicked on a Story in His Newsfeed. You Won't Believe What Happened Next!’, Operaphila, 29 June 2019, www.operaphila.org/backstage/opera-blog/2019/denisandkatyastory/.