Intercultural Relations: Direct Audience Address in Contemporary Theatre in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the phenomenon of direct audience address in contemporary theatre in Canada, focusing in particular on how it informs discussions of theatrical interculturalism. It addresses a dearth of scholarship on this common theatrical device, while arguing that limited mainstream understandings of direct address have contributed to its marginalized position in scholarship. The chapters that follow draw from existing theoretical frameworks in theatre and performance studies and other disciplines in order to map out direct address as a theatrical phenomenon that can extend the dramaturgical work of a theatre piece, and begin to chart its history and contemporary roots in the Canadian theatre scene. The following chapters also establish how the concept of relationality helps to illuminate the work that direct address does, particularly in intercultural contexts. \n \nChapter one explores direct address in theatre in Canada, drawing from interviews with contemporary theatre artists who employ direct address in their work and existing literature on monologue, solo performance, and a range of performance forms to theorize direct address in a Canadian context. Chapter two explores direct audience address in Tetsuro Shigematsu's autobiographical play Empire of the Son. It draws on media studies conceptions of technological immediacy to investigate Shigematsu's use of multimedia and direct address to illuminate his complicated relationship with his father, which carries implications for how we understand interpersonal and intercultural distance and difference and theatrical immediacy. Chapter three explores how the oppositional gaze of direct address in Cliff Cardinal's Huff challenges settler audiences to examine their complicity and undo harmful conceptual binaries that mar Indigenous-settler relations and perpetuate injustices. Chapter four, a queer feminist reading of Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Evalyn Parry's Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, examines how direct address is part of the show's larger messaging to encourage relational ways of living, and how Williamson Bathory's performance of uaajeerneq mask dance models for spectators this relationality in real time. \nThese varied case studies present an introductory look into direct address' richness, while exploring how the way in which an audience is addressed and who that audience is can have significant impact on a performances meaning-making process.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".