Theatrical Affordances to Stage the Perceived-Experienced Reality of People with Dementia: Florian Zeller’s Dramaturgy of Porosity in <i>The Father</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates how French playwright Florian Zeller positions his writing with respect to realism in his play The Father (Le Père, 2012) and what his dramaturgy of porosity adds to the representation of dementia in contemporary theatre. Through an analysis of the text of The Father and its West End theatre production (2015), this article demonstrates the ways in which this play challenges the dominant perspective in theatre that depicts dementia from the perspective of the outsiders – i.e., those who do not have dementia. On stage, the perceived reality of persons living with dementia has often been portrayed as an illusion, in contrast to the ‘true’ reality perceived by neurotypical people. This article examines how Zeller’s dramaturgy of porosity, by making the audience see the reality from the perspective of the protagonist living with dementia, generates encounters with alternative ways of perceiving and relating to the world. While drawing on theoretical discussions on neurodivergent aesthetics, this paper argues that contemporary theatre can evoke divergent consciousnesses of persons with dementia by using dramaturgical and theatrical strategies.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".