MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4380925593 · doi:10.3138/ctr.131.014

Theatre Unplugged: The Technology of a Performer-Centred Theatre

2007· article· en· W4380925593 on OpenAlexvenueaboutno aff
Jillian Keiley

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Theatre Review · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTheatre and Performance Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPerforming artsVisual artsTheatre directorPerformative utteranceAestheticsArtChoreographyDance

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

If the technicians for a production are those who realize the visual and aural designs of the director and designer, what, then, if the onstage actors are the executors of the visual and aural aspects of the production? It’s a tangly suggestion, but an argument can be made for performer-based technical theatre. These are productions where it is the actors, executing instructions from the playwright, designer and director, who create the onstage “effects” or, in their physical or vocal actions, indicate the time, place and mood to the audience. This is most simply exemplified by scripts that have time, place and mood references in the text. But the theatre I’m talking about uses more than stated references to indicate this information. It uses the actors’ voices in music for the soundscape and their bodies in stillness and motion as the landscape. If it is the performers who are executing the main design of the designer, could we call them technicians? OK, they’re not, in a plug-in, soldering, climb-a-ladder, call-a-cue, run-a-show way, but they can be in an execute-the-design way. And because the focus of this CTR is the intersection of technology and theatre, humour me here, and let’s agree that some actors in some productions have more technical items than others. It’s not a new style in Canada: the choreography of the “set” of the Farm Show was most influential, and a great deal of performer—technical work is now done by companies like Video Cabaret, Theatre Gargantua, Theatre Smith Gilmour and many puppet theatres, led by companies like One Yellow Rabbit, who stand alongside the amalgamation of technically active performers and actual technicians in Robert Lepage s work. So lets call this brand of artist “performer-technicians” (just in this technology + theatre quarterly) – the actors who are responsible for the set changes and the sound changes, as well as the embodiment of character(s). In Vancouver, companies like Radix, Rumble and the Electric Company are calling this kind of performer who is involved in all aspects of the production an “artist” as opposed to an “actor.” Here the artist takes a fuller responsibility for the entire staged creation, from text work, to the moving of sets, to singing underscores. This seems to be prevalent in a lot of what is called “creation” theatre or “devised” theatre, but it isn’t as common as I had previously thought. There is a line, a very solid line, between theatre that uses its performers to create the space, the effect and the sound and theatre that uses actors solely to inhabit a role. A strictly role-inhabiting actor kindly pointed out this delineation to me just this year, as he grumbled through rolling a set piece. “This,” he said, “is bullshit.”

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.950
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.231
Teacher spread0.209 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2007
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueCanadian Theatre ReviewSame topicTheatre and Performance StudiesFrench-language works237,207