Oral history studies are fed by many research streams, including folklore, memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, psychology, communication studies, critical cultural studies, and, increasingly, performance studies, raising the critical question: how do performance analytics change our understanding of and approach to experience narrative (oral history, life history, stories of collective experience)? / Performance and narrative / In the late 1970s, after the publication of Richard Bauman's landmark “Verbal Art as Performance,” folklore/vernacular studies attended more vigorously to processes of transmission, shifting the focus of study from the re-presentation of verbal art as fact (or artifact) to the rehearsal of site-specific interaction identified as performance. This shift relied on Bauman's four criteria: competency (demonstrable skill or status as a storyteller); intensity (the sense of a special time, space, and ways of seeing and knowing experience to which performance indicators “key” in audiences); emergence (the unpredictable and uncontrollable shape, affect, and outcomes of time-space aesthetics); and changing structures of social relations (immediate changes among participants heralding change on a larger scale “as if” by proxy). Bauman positioned performance as a critical frame that illumined the authority, reflexivity, and transformative power of some art acts. Thus Bauman encouraged us to answer the persistent question, what is performance?, by asking instead: in what ways is it useful to call a particular act or set of interactions “performance”?