Work
A Thousand Ways
Maker La Jolla Playhouse · Work date 2021-01-21 · Medium telephone · Role work
Description
A Thousand Ways is a triptych of encounters between strangers. Guided by a score of instructions, questions, prompts, and physical directives, people who have never met build a series of performances for one another. Each installment of the piece explores the line between strangeness and kinship, distance and proximity, and how the most intimate assembly can become profoundly radical.
Source. No published description found.
Anatomy
Thirteen criteria after Lauren R. Beck. Each carries a source grade: M maker-confirmed, P published, F first-hand, I inferred by the compiler, ? not yet established. Definitions are on the anatomy page.
- Participants listen through headphonesnoI
The listed medium is telephone; no headphone requirement is stated.
- Participants move through space as part of the workunknown?
The score includes “physical directives,” which may or may not require changing location — the description does not say.
Did you experience this? Tell us - Audio technology is necessaryyesI
The encounter between the two strangers is carried entirely by the phone.
- Site-, situation- or language-specificnoI
No location, named circumstance or language is required; being strangers is a relation, not a site or situation.
- Engages with the history of a sitenoI
Content is instructions, questions and prompts exchanged between strangers, not documented events of a real place.
- Created for an urban environmentnoI
A telephone encounter presupposes a phone, not urban infrastructure.
- Created as an artwork other than theaterunknown?
Being “guided by a score” hints at instruction-based art, but no non-theatrical discipline is named.
Did you experience this? Tell us - Intended to be understood as theateryesP
“People who have never met build a series of performances for one another,” presented by La Jolla Playhouse.
- Accidental real-world sights and sounds are importantunknown?
The description says nothing about the participants’ real surroundings.
Did you experience this? Tell us - Spectator must participateyesP
The participants themselves build the performances by following instructions, questions, prompts and physical directives.
- Has live performers other than the participantsnoI
The description attributes guidance to a score and the performing to the two participants, with no third-party performer named.
- Involves game playnoI
A score of prompts with no objective, scoring or resolution state.
- Uses props other than the listening deviceunknown?
No materials are mentioned.
Did you experience this? Tell us
4 of thirteen are still unknown for this work. If you experienced it, you can settle them in a minute.