Sounding a Crip Aesthetic: Transforming the Sonic in Samuel Beckett’s Not I
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes a recent production of Samuel Beckett’s play Not I performed by Jess Thom, a neurodiverse performer most well known by the moniker Touretteshero. Not I is a monologue of twisting and fragmented text revered for the physical, vocal, and emotional challenge it presents to performers and audiences alike. This article takes up the aesthetic, material, and sonic changes made to the play in the Touretteshero production, which serve to reimagine and reconstruct the “sonic profile” of the work. Together, these changes enact a crip aesthetic that illuminates the often-hidden exclusionary structures that permeate theatrical practice. Specifically, this article describes the material changes made to the production in the service of increased accessibility for performer and audience, how Thom’s vocal tics interact with Beckett’s already fragmented text, and how the production’s integration of sign language interpretation extends how we conceptualize sound. Through this analysis, Thom’s performance emerges as a revolutionary contribution to contemporary disability arts that reimagines the value of disability and the possibilities for sound in performance.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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; 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".