Performing the Other: Post-Humanism and Mediatized Senses in The Wooster Group’s Production of <i>The Room</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Wooster Group’s 2015 production of Harold Pinter’s The Room addresses the play’s neglected post-human elements. By juxtaposing trans-cultural media and simulacra, among other performance elements, the Wooster Group compelled spectators to engage with how, at the time of its original composition, Pinter raised questions of alterity, identity, and displacement as the United Kingdom was experiencing a demographic shift that challenged then-contemporary racist and masculinist definitions of the “human.” Additionally, The Wooster Group engaged with various aspects of post-humanism through embodied performance: the performers use prosthetic technologies to expose how characters express or fail to manifest agency, and incorporate various trans-cultural aesthetic sources as well as a strict and unconventionally literal adherence to the source text to underscore the distributed nature of selfhood. I suggest that these features of The Room can be brought to bear on more contemporary examples of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and classism and might be staged to speak to recent social movements, including Black Lives Matter.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".