Catching Othello’s echoes in Harlem Duet: A conversation on Shakespearean adaptation, blackness and African Diaspora Theatre with Djanet Sears
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Caribbean Canadian playwright, actress and director Djanet Sears has created theatre pieces that explore Canadian manifestations of the African diaspora for over three decades. Her works include the autobiographical play Afrika Solo (1990), Double Trouble (1988), The Mother Project (1990), Who Killed Katie Ross (1994) and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (2002). Between 1995 and 1996, Sears developed Harlem Duet (1997), a theatrical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello that explores the intersection of racism and sexism in North American black communities, and how interlocking systems of oppression infiltrate the psyche of black people and their most intimate relationships. In an interview conducted in July 2016 at the University of Toronto Art Centre, Sears discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and early career, the genesis and the making of Harlem Duet, as well as its most important North American productions. She also elucidates how the blues aesthetic and black feminism informed her Shakespearean adaptation of Othello in ways that helped her to counter stereotypical representations of black masculinity and black womanhood produced within dominant discourses.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".