Feeling together: the affective project of co-presence and the limits of the audience community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
News headlines post-pandemic question whether audience members have ‘forgotten how to behave’ amidst incidents of disruption to theatre performances, suggesting audience norms are in a time of renegotiation and expectations of what it means to be co-present are shifting. This article uses qualitative audience data solicited from spectators attending live, in-person performances in 2021 and 2022 to examine how audiences conceive of, value, and cultivate collective experiences. Data suggest that affect is a strong motivator for audiences to attend co-present performance experiences, and that audiences are motivated to anticipate and enact affective projects in which feelings are circulated amongst a collective who may perceive themselves to feel together. These affective projects, however, are bound up in hegemonic norms that, while they may be pleasurable to some, also replicate exclusionary harms and are therefore in need of close examination and re-evaluation alongside larger reforms to the normative theatre audience experience.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".