The Space Stage and the Circus: E.E. Cummings's <i>Him</i> and Frederick Kiesler's <i>Raumbühne</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Supported by archival research, this essay investigates E.E. Cummings's conception of experimental theatre as it informs his understudied play Him, which the Provincetown Players produced in 1928 under the direction of James Light but which critics have dismissed alternately as a distraction from Cummings's poetry or as an example of a failed closet drama. The essay argues for the importance of theatre – and of the production of Him in particular – to Cummings's literary career. In turn, it makes a case for Cummings's relevance to the field of modern drama. More pointedly, the essay reveals the twin influences on Cummings's dramatic work of, on the one hand, circus and burlesque performers and, on the other, Bauhaus-trained set designer Frederick Kiesler. As articulated especially in his so-called “space stage,” Kiesler's vision for an avant-garde theatre modelled on popular subcultures like the circus shaped Cummings's own speculative theatre.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".