On action type labels: Can enactments in theater rehearsals be understood as proposals?

Actions are usually described as generic types by drawing on context-free criteria such as who benefits or performs the actions. Dealing with a specific type of action tied to the setting in which it occurs—that is, actors’ enactments in theater rehearsals—we argue that action labels sometimes must be conceptualized in more setting-specific ways, including factors such as participation framework, division of labor, activity types, and practical tasks. Drawing on a corpus of 400 hours of video-recordings of professional theater productions, we show that actors’ enactments responding to directors’ instructions are not simply implementations of the instruction but propose a possible embodied solution of how a scene could be played. Responsive enactments have a high degree of authorship, as they contain elements that were not part of the original instruction. Enacted proposals do not come in specialized turn-formats and do not formulate future actions. Data are in German.