Outcast: Limits and Possibilities in Casting Black Performers in the Age of Granular Dramaturgy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of Black performance in Canada goes back to the early nineteenth century alongside blackface. In the late twentieth century, ‘blind casting’ became an opportunity for Black performers to work on canonical works of Western theatre. But this form of casting is problematic as it asks the audience to look beyond the identity of the performer, to disregard any important facet of their humanity. As casting is evolving to acknowledge the identity of the performers, some cases show that cultural casting demands additional human and financial resources so that the work is precise and culturally accurate. A deft use of conscious casting can lead to more layered and additional aesthetic complexity to play in the repertoire. A judicious application of our new paradigms in culturally specific and safer spaces should not be construed as dogma; in fact, there are occasions where we must subvert our thinking for greater artistic results and compassionate treatment of performers. Lenity and mindfulness in casting will guide casting directors and institutional dramaturges, and this will yield better artistic results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".