The Impact of Pochinko-Based Clown Theatre at Debajehmujig Storytellers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Debajehmujig Theatre Group was founded by Shirley Cheechoo in 1984 in M’Chigeeng on Manitoulin Island. It was the first professional theatre company to operate on-reserve and the first to tour to other reserves across Canada. The company mandate is to contribute to the vitalization of the culture, language, and heritage of the Anishnabek by creating original work, by and about the Anishnabek, to share and educate Native and non-Native people. In this article, Bruce Naokwegijig (Artistic Director) and Joahnna Berti (Outreach and Education Director) reflect on the role that Pochinko-based clown training has played in the work and productions of their company. The artists at Debajehmujig began formally working with these Clown through Mask techniques in 2002 when they invited John Turner to provide training for the company. Over the past eighteen years, Turner has served as a teacher, collaborator, and director and helped to deepen Debajehmujig’s connection to these clown techniques, originally developed by Richard Pochinko. This article offers an opportunity for Naokwegijig and Berti to reflect on the ways that these clown techniques resonate with Anishnabe teachings and world-view. In particular, they consider the symmetry between the ‘clown rules’ and traditional storytelling, the ‘free-flowing’ nature and multiplicity of the character work as a vehicle for expressing iconic Anishnabe characters, and the power of creativity and direct audience interaction for connecting cross-cultural audiences with culture-based performances.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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; 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".