Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vertical City (VC), of which I am the Artistic Director, is an interdisciplinary performance hub located in Toronto, Canada. Our use of the term hub-as opposed to company or collective-is intended to evoke creative and administrative core around which diverse and mutable combination of artistic perspectives and disciplines may orbit. YouTopia (2013) reflects VC's signature use of such postdramatic elements as aerial movement, engineered installation environments, sensory immersion, interactive intermediality, and dense live/recorded soundscapes. At the same time, our productions regularly incorporate core dramatic components of traditional theatrical performance, such as progressive narrative structures and distinct characterisation. However, we attempt to systematically relocate these familiar conventions into overtly performative contexts through pronounced interdisciplinary negotiation and the transformation of audience perception via intermedial modification. As such, although VC performances are often intensely physical, endurance-based, and executed within demanding, occasionally treacherous material environments, this essay will focus on less obvious yet central element of risk within our work. Put most directly, VC attempts to create in contexts that aim-conspicuously, intentionally, and, in our assessment, productively-to overwhelm conventional theatrical constructs and contracts. What is primarily gambled upon in VC production, then, is sincerity : generous, vulnerable concession of the fragility of theatrical intimacy amidst the aggressive, performative excess that reflects contemporary social experience.1. FOUNDATIONSThe first configuration of VC, dating from autumn 2007, included two aerialists, two physical performers, musician, director/writer, and dramaturg. Among the most recent roster-that which mounted YouTopia in 2013-only the writer/director (myself) and the dramaturg (Pil Hansen) were involved in the earliest work. Added to the ranks, however, were an electronic music composer/ performer (Richard Windeyer), lighting/projections designer (Laird MacDonald), an interactive media author/technician (Jim Ruxton), visual/installation artist (Sherri Hay), mechanical/spatial engineer (Marcus Jamin), Lecoq-trained playmaker (Adam Paolozza), and film and actress/pole dancer (Kiran Friesan). The journey between these two groupings has involved mostly gradual (and occasionally abrupt) comingling of distinct backgrounds of training, fields of expertise, orientations to performance, and aesthetic frames. What has remained consistent, however, is basic drive to explore and exploit psychophysical instability via interdisciplinary and intermedial negotiation.The initial inspiration for VC came from two accomplished Toronto aerialists, Lori Le Mare and Diane McGrath, who were seeking to more thoroughly integrate movement, music, and text in their routines, so that their performances might become less pure spectacle and more interdisciplinary projects. Without any formal training in the discipline, their understanding of theatre was abstract and indistinct-and, thus, charged with potential. On one level, they were drawn by the psychological and emotional possibilities associated with traditional theatrical elements such as unified narratives and familiar dramaturgical structures. However, our collaboration quickly extended the conversation beyond reciprocal interpretive relationship between specific theatrical conventions and corresponding audience expectations into conceptual consideration of the affective qualities and potential associated with theatricality.Of course, theatricality is much discussed and debated concept, one that has traveled complex and circuitous route since Josette Feral's problematic yet still evocative designation, a cleft in the quotidian (2002, 98). I have explored this evolution, along with that of theatricality's equally contentious sibling, performativity, in multiple other contexts (see, for example, Barton 2007, 2009a, and 2009b), and thorough survey of neither idea is warranted in this essay. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".