Mary Cocking's Page

Ivan Cutting is Artistic Director for the Eastern Angles Theatre Company. He uses oral history in theatre productions, and is currently working on an oral history project called ‘Forty Years on… The story of an expanding city’. I asked Ivan to tell us a bit about…

I first heard about oral history three years ago, through reading about a project which aimed to record the histories of the immigrant community of Bexley. The project was led by the charity Mind and it aimed to explore the relationship between mental health issues and the experiences of moving to a new place.

I decided to volunteer on this project interviewing individuals, some of which had fled from places such as Uganda in the time of Idi Amin, leaving behind their wealth, their…

Has anybody seen the recent film‘Life in a Day’by Director Kevin MacDonald? A request was sent out on YouTube to film a single day on the earth, and 80,000 people responded with footage of a day in July last year. The footage was then shaped to create a film. The film was inspired by the Mass Observation movement, in that it attempted to record the experiences of the lives of ordinary people.

The Mass…

Have you ever wished you could have a conversation with somebody who lived in a different place or time? Or tried to remember the stories you heard from older relatives, but failed to recount the details which seemed so important? Or have you wanted to understand what it feels to live in somebody else’s shoes? Through written accounts and oral histories, memories and life histories can be recorded and preserved.

Oral history is a method of collecting life stories through…