A post by artist Tania El Khoury.

There is something apologetic about the word ‘Scratch.’ It often sounds to me that it’s addressed to the middle class and elitist theatre crowd who are struggling to understand the whole deal with live art so we gave them the word ‘Scratch.’ But is this really helping us? Doesn’t an overuse of the word ‘scratch’ end up making live art sounds like an unfinished theatre?

Besides, why do we always have to invent new words? Performance Art, Live Art, Scratch, Work in Progress, One on One, Intimate performances, Autotheatre…

We already have so many obstacles working in this industry such as the form being relatively new with limited audience and limited funding so maybe it’s not very clever if we add a linguistic obstacle between us and our audience.

It’s a show! Come see it, you will get it. Or not. Me theorizing it beforehand will only alienate you even more.

There is definitely a question of pretension here probably borrowed from visual arts. Contemporary visual artists often use big words, flashy terms, long complicated texts accompanying simplistic objects such as a whistle attached to the wall that gets sold for thousands of pounds.