Bibliographic record
Abstract
SHERILL GRACE Making Theatre: A Life of Pollock. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2008. 480 pp. Illus., index. Sherrill Grace's wonderful biography, Making Theatre: A Life of Pollock, captures magically the intense pulse of the art and life, so far, of one of the greatest playwrights we have known in Canada or anywhere in the English-speaking world. Pollock's works have been produced on all of Canada's major anglophone stages and on many of its alternative venues; they have been widely enjoyed internationally. Making Theatre, a big book in every way and a joy to read, provides a richly fertile setting to contemplate and savour the remarkable dimensions of Pollock's work, which includes a large number of stage plays for adult audiences, radio and television plays, and plays for young audiences. She has also made a significant mark on Canadian theatre as an actor, director, teacher, theatre administrator, theatre founder, and commentator. Pollock's career in the theatre, which covers more than four decades, flows right up to today like a vital stream through the decades as Canadian theatre was coming into being as a major cultural phenomenon. Grace's personal and engaged voice in Making Theatre traces the bends in this stream as she takes us simultaneously on an exciting journey through the corpus of stage plays for adult audiences and the courageously exhilarating life of the person she calls throughout the book and whom she describes as an intellectual and creative dynamo, as well as an enormously human woman: formidable, funny, feisty, and full of opinions (355). approach thoughtfully chosen and developed with particularly original pizzazz by Grace to tell the story is a skilful blending of multiple contexts and a weaving of a dazzling array of impeccably verified facts, accounts of personal events and issues beginning in Pollock's early years, analyses of plays, rehearsals, and performances, discussions of political and ethical stakes embedded in moments of history, reminders of exciting developments across the anglophone theatre landscape in Canada, and probing queries into the meaning of concepts and practices such as dramaturgy, writing, theatricality, autobiography, and biography. In addition to the almost four-hundred-page biographical text itself, Making Theatre includes forty-four illustrations that bring performance moments to life and allow readers to see as herself or in some of the roles she played, those with whom she worked and shared her life, and the places that have had a determining influence on her art. As well, the four appendices offer two early stories published by Pollock, detailed information on the operation in Calgary of the Garry Theatre 1992-97, a previously unpublished and fascinating interview by Kathleen Flaherty: The Many Voices of Pollock (1994), and a Sharon Chronology (1936-2008). volume concludes with detailed lists of sources that Grace consulted for the book as a whole and for each chapter, as well as a 36-page Comprehensive Bibliography. Both of these bring to light new paths that theatre people, scholars, and students can follow as they undertake their own explorations of Pollock's rich oeuvre and life in the theatre. staggering wealth of reliable information and material in Making Theatre, often dredged up from little-known and modest sources, makes of it a model of scholarly research and biography with flair, and an invaluable reference work. very special quality of Making Theatre as both scholarly study and biography is the subjective place assumed in the text by Grace herself and her personal voice that is heard throughout the book. Her warm style and expressive voice make her an integral part of the same story-telling process that she sees as a dominant characteristic of Pollock's dramaturgical approach. Grace reflects cogently in the first person on the sexist and classist traditions of theatre and biography as genres, and she draws attention to the fact that biography has not been well-developed in Canada. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.056 | 0.024 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".