Decolonial Performance Practice: Witnessing with an Ethic of Incommensurability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The starting premise of this paper is that our current crisis of environmental degradation is inextricably linked with capitalist, colonial and patriarchal exploitation. If environmental and colonial histories are co-constitutive, then performing ecology needs to attend to structures of power that function to control human relationships to land and the nonhuman world. In this paper, I will explore the act of witnessing another’s story in the context of settler colonial Canada through my personal experience as a settler Canadian watching Cree playwright and performer Cliff Cardinal’s solo show, Huff, which premiered in 2015 and has since gone on to tour nationally and internationally. How do we witness something outside ourselves in a way that recognises relationship and difference? Drawing on theories of witnessing and incommensurability, I explore what being an ethical witness to another’s story in theatre and performance might look like, especially when a play like Huff is situated in Canada’s supposed era of Truth and Reconciliation.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".