Feeling Real: Affective Dimensions of Reality in Contemporary Canadian Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking as its central focus the question, “What feels real to contemporary audiences?” this project investigates the use, production, and perception of realness in current Canadian performance practices. By considering the tools for and effects of realness present in three case studies, this thesis examines how audience members locate realness within a show’s unique temporal and spatial dimensions. Such an examination of the “real” destabilizes the arguably foundational binary between reality and fiction and illustrates the complexity of determining what constitutes realness in contemporary culture. The first chapter contains an overview of the concept of realness in performance, establishes the utility of feeling and affect as modes for investigating realness, and concludes with an argument for audience-led research into perceptions of realness. The second chapter focuses on Downstage Theatre Company’s Good Fences to argue that the show’s use of multivalent spaces and times results in the presentation of multiple truths; making space for audience members to debate, discuss, and compare perceptions of what is real. The third chapter considers Rising Tide Theatre’s Trinity Pageant and its use of site-specificity and historical re-enactment to outline how the presentation of a blended temporality ultimately inspires audiences to act to preserve Newfoundland culture. Through comparison with other immersive theatre projects, the final chapter considers how Outside the March’s TomorrowLoveÔ’s unique composition requires audience labour that goes beyond the necessary physical navigation of an immersive space and the immediacy of sensory exploration. The chapter concludes that the show’s provocation of real feelings in audience members, as a form of affect-labour, lends to the perception of the show itself as real. The case studies illustrate the ways in which performances cultivate “real-ish-ness”: a term that attempts to capture the fragmentary, partial, complex feeling that is generated by and through the act of engaging elements of reality. This thesis thus provokes a consideration of the ways in which performances of theatre of the real impact and complicate reality in ways pressingly important for a contemporary culture both excited by and anxious about advancements that bring us closer to a blurred line between the real and fictive.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".