Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the contemporary trend of participatory performance pieces that seek to arouse discomfort in spectators and contemplates the radical potential of pieces that instead solicit coziness. Through it, Lynch highlights and deconstructs common assumptions about affect and politics in participatory theatre. The author begins by delineating the terms of the discussion, defining participatory performance broadly: as works that directly or indirectly invite the physical and/or intellectual participation of their audiences. In doing so, she connects more conventional forms of participatory theatre (which ask for spectators’ physical involvement), with modes of performance like direct audience address that more subtly call for participation and are often left out of discussions of participation and performance. Noting that “cozy” modes of affect associated with warmth and care may more often be scrutinized for their political potential, Lynch argues that performances that employ discomfort as part of their political strategies, which might be similarly limited, are often not subject to the same scrutiny. Using Adam Lazarus’s bouffon piece Daughter as a grounding example, she then explores some of the limits of discomfort as an approach to political engagement. Lynch discusses how discomfort can be deployed in reductive ways that may in some cases undermine the political points these pieces strive to make by centring the status quo and disproportionately distributing discomfort across heterogeneous audiences. Finally, as a counterpoint to the way uncomfortable theatre is often conceptualized, she offers some brief thoughts on what revolutionary theatre that engages with coziness might look like or be.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".