Videos

"Listening out Loud" Technique in Projecting the Purge:

For this project, I utilized an exercise created by Della Pollock, a performance and cultural studies scholar, called "Listening out Loud." The exercise was created for the purpose of analyzing the way that we listen to the stories of others, and how our personal experiences and perspectives are inherently a part of how we engage and remember others' memories and stories. The "Listening out Loud," exercise is utilized to listen to someone else's story, but to only listen, not using any notes or recording devices to collect the story (since I was listening to an already-recorded video versus someone speaking to me in person, I watched the video twice through before the exercise). Then, you re-share the story as if you are the owner of the story yourself, using 'I' statements. You begin sharing the story by stating, "This is what I heard." As stated by Pollock themselves, "The goal of the re-tellings is not to get the story 'right' or to imitate what the teller said, but instead to incorporate, "others' memories into the body of our own and then again into others' through.... reperformance," to embrace how persons and stories are connected and differentiated, familiar and misrecognized. In other words, the retellings embody the inside-out movements of stories and storytelling." (Adams, Jones, Ellis, 53)

I utilized this technique for a few reasons. The main reason that I resorted to this was because of ethical capabilities of finishing this project in the confines of a semester-long course. I began this project wanting to pursue the possibility of projecting the actual oral history videos from LGBT Purge- Survivor Stories project onto the National Defence Department Building. But, I quickly recognized that I would want (and need) to receive permissions from the survivors' themselves to use their videos for this project, as well as from the LGBT Purge Fund themselves. I still wanted to utilize the important first-hand experiences and knowledge from the LGBT Purge in my projection project. This led me to finding out about the "Listening out Loud," exercise from a colleague, Meranda Gallupe-Paton, through one of our many conversations about our work. This exercise allowed me to engage in the possibilities of promoting intergenerational conversations through this project as well. As a young queer person myself, this exercise really pushed me to engage with this history in a deeply personal way- I did not simply listen to these interviews, but embraced these experiences and brought them into conversation with my own. This exercise really forced me to engage with their memory in a deeper capacity, bringing my present experiences of being a queer person in Canada in dialogue with the experiences of these survivors of the LGBT Purge.

Patti Gray

The video that I selected to use for my "Listening out Loud exercise," from the LGBT Purge- Survivor Stories was the oral history of Patti Gray, who was a Private in the Naval Reserves and the Canadian Armed Forces. I chose to use her oral history in this project because her story really touched me on first viewing, and the strength that she has. I have provided Patti Gray's original oral history video from the LGBT Purge-Survivor Stories that I used for my "Listening out Loud exercise," and I placed our videos side by side to view together, to see the exercise itself.