To Witness Mimesis: The Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Testimonial Theatre in <i>Through the Wire</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This paper examines an Australian “verbatim play” about asylum seekers, Through the Wire, in order to consider the relationship between realism and witnessing in the theatre. It argues that verbatim or testimonial theatre is better understood as a form of realism than as a form of documentary theatre, as is usually the case. Current scholarship in both theatre and trauma studies criticizes realist approaches principally on ethical grounds, without necessarily accounting for a play’s political effects. Through an analysis of Through the Wire’s production and reception, I suggest that, while testimonial theatre may be ethically problematic, it can also be politically efficacious, precisely because of its realist aesthetics.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it