About

The PSi Archive and Oral History Project collects the history of PSi by drawing together under a single home the many documents, memorabilia and remembrances that are currently scattered across the filing cabinets and memories of many individuals so that the emergence and development of Performance Studies international is accessible to future scholars and performers. The PSi Oral History project was launched in 2011 by Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University) with Rivka Eisner (Aarhus University), Heike Roms (Aberystwyth University) and John Carnwath (Northwestern University). It was led by Lisa Peschel (University of York) in 2012-13 and later organized by Solomon Lennox (Northumbia University).

To this date, forty interviews have been conducted by volunteers worldwide. So far the project has emphasized interviews with PSi leaders, including Board members and conference organizers, as well as other artists and scholars whose work has been particularly influential in the field of performance studies.                                                                     

The interviews have been recorded in high-quality digital audio, and the files are held at New York University’s Fales Library, along with the rest of PSi’s archive. This website makes available compressed versions (forthcoming by Fall 2022).

If you are interested in being interviewed, or if you would like to join us as a volunteer interviewer, or if you have any suggestions for extending this project, please contact PSi Archivist Anna Jayne Kimmel (ajkimmel@stanford.edu). Any material will be of interest – from actual pieces of documentation to vague memories of events caught out of the corner of your eye.

Performing the Memories of the Field, Shanghai 2014 At the PSi21 Conference in Shanghai in 2014, we began to explore different approaches to conducting oral history interviews, including group interviews and soliciting memories around objects connected with the history of the association. And we explored new ways of making the interview material available to conference delegates. This project was developed by Yiota Demetriou (University of Bristol) in collaboration with Heike Roms.