Appropriating the ‘real’: ethical explorations in the creation of fictional verbatim performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Appropriating the ‘real’ is a practice-led investigation that researches the extent to which verbatim theatre techniques can be appropriated to create a fictional performance. Criticisms of verbatim theatre’s ‘truth claims’ – that it is a re-presentation of the ‘real’ – are both dramaturgical and ethical. Addressing these concerns, the practice presented here sets out to experiment with “indecidability” (Lehmann, 2006:101), heightening the audience’s perception of the gap between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’, chiefly by drawing attention to the role of the theatre maker. Located at the interface between contemporary performance and applied theatre, this research project explores conventions of both schools. On the one hand, it utilises compositional strategies of collage, autobiography and disruption employed by performance practitioners. On the other hand, it develops a collaborative practice that is empathetically and ethically rooted in the words of those it re-presents. \n \nThis practice-led research is made up of this supporting thesis alongside a trilogy of performances: The Unsettling; Everybody Always Tells the Truth; and Is It Different Now?. The practice focuses on three aspects: the participants who have contributed their stories, the role of the artist when making fictional verbatim theatre, and the development of an aesthetic of indecidability. The thesis engages with verbatim theatre from contemporary performance and applied theatre contexts and addresses a range of critical perspectives including representation and ethics. \n \nBy re-mixing verbatim testimony with self-consciously fictitious material, I draw the audiences’ attention to the way verbatim material can be manipulated. The intention is to show an audience how ‘truths’ are constructed within theatrical forms that purport to authentically recreate the real. There is political efficacy in unmasking the strategies within documentary, but a new multi-perspective story may also communicate and be reflective of the ways we process and construct personal and shared narratives.
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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 | 0.023 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".