GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Exercise
A set of instructions, prompts or actions designed to help performers hone a specific skill. In an exercise the performers are freed from caring for a choreographic arc over time and given permission to focus their attention on the task at hand. (an isolated task)

Performed Score
A set of landmarks that serve as a map for performers.  These scores fall in various points along the continuum of set material and improvised prompts. A performed score has consideration for the overall structure over time as opposed to an exercise (see above for definition) which is more concerned with honing a specific skill. The Interview Structure is a performed score. Examples of choreographers known for their use of scores: Simone Forti, Richard Bull, Mary Overlie, and Yvonne Rainer. My scores often include a range of physical, emotional and vocal actions and prompts. Some are tightly sculpted and others space more value on active discovery.

Landscape Theater
Landscape theater is one of playwriting’s minor literatures. The term derives from Gertrude Stein, who described her plays as landscapes, where the composition was understood and experienced as a living field of relations as opposed to a more traditional, plot-driven series of causes and events, character revelation and development. Passed forward through both performance and poetry lineages across the 20th century and into the present, this kind of work emphasizes both a feeling of continuous marking of a present moment, and a sense of lateral plenitude. It would be uncommon to hear a contemporary theater artist describe their work as “landscape theater,” but the strategies it offers as an alternative to more canonical narrative forms, are very much in use, and ideas derived from a considered response to Stein’s theater were central to our language practices in this project.

Narrator

In the field of oral history, “narrator” refers to the interviewee. The distinction is meaningful, attributing primacy to the role–while recognizing the interview’s outcome as narrative. The more traditional term, “interviewee,” implies that the interviewer is the principle actor. Within the social sciences, the narrator is often called an “informant.”

Witness
Witness is one of three roles assigned during a forced encounter we referred to as the “witness exercise” during our oral history training.  During this exercise, the assigned witness supports both Interviewer and Interviewee (Narrator) with a commitment to witness (remain), observe, record and interpret various aspects of a practice interview. The pair directly engaged in the interview is relieved of these responsibilities, encouraged to participate more rigorously in the interview by externalizing–using a third person–a kind of inner observer, or even critic. Ultimately, the role of witness is merged with that of the Interviewer. “Witness” also refers to one of the Interviewer’s main jobs: to serve as abiding witness.