Description
This seminar presents a methodology of transcribing and editing audio testimony from a storytelling project to create the documentary play, Courage Songs (2022). The storytelling project of the same name brought together five Birmingham-based women, including me, to share songs and their impact on our lives. The project, which took place at the University of Birmingham’s Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, explored the women’s approaches to multilingual storytelling and female post-migration experiences. The women consented for these stories to be audio recorded and written into the play, which they read and approved.I negotiated the stages of transcribing and editing their/our voices with a view to providing the greatest linguistic variation. By harnessing variation across the characters’ English varieties, I attempted to communicate their/our personalities, cultural sensibilities and ‘ways of knowing’ cultural knowledge.
In this seminar, I focus on two excerpts. The first is from the testimony of a woman who became the British Bangladeshi character, Uzma, who draws on a British English variety, having grown up in the West Midlands since she was three years old. The second, taken from the script, voices the character of Claire (based on me), who draws on an Australian English variety, having grown up in Australia and lived in Germany and the UK for thirteen years. Both English varieties display patterns that suggest some mixing with other linguistic resources. My approach to editing this testimony honours these patterns and avoids the standardisation that is common in documentary theatre. Analyses are situated in relationship to the decolonial storytelling methodologies with which I frame myself in my ongoing role as a participant in dialogue with the women.
| Period | 6 Dec 2023 |
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| Held at | University of Warwick, United Kingdom |