Recollection of an Audience: Style, Experience, and Change in the Study of Theatre Spectatorship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This emic-oriented, uniquely mixed methods project explores the evidence for theatrically induced change and the individual contexts and processes that accompany it. The transformative power of theatre has been the source of much speculation and increasingly marked by agnosticism in recent years, but it has rarely received rigorous empirical consideration nor solicited the extended investment of first-hand spectatorial input. To address this lack, this dissertation offers unique models of theatrically induced change drawn from quantitative and qualitative data collected from 180 pre/post-show surveys and 30 extended interviews in partnership with four aesthetically and persuasively distinct Toronto-based theatre companies. The data is put into conversation with reception scholarship from theatre studies, media studies, and psychology in order to yield new insights into theatrically-induced change. Change – often incoherently conceptualized and unsubstantiated in audience theory – is interrogated here as both a shift in the valence and intensity of a spectator’s attitudes over the course of a show, and the perception of artistically induced affective disruption leading to distinct channels of rethinking and possibly inner realignment. In light of accounts offered by the spectators, the process of change seems to be largely generated by the mismatch between a production’s dominant artistic modes and the familiar perceptual patterns adopted by spectators to help mediate their often unappreciated levels of anxiety and degrees of investment. The dynamic and patterned influence of a spectator’s disposition toward theatrical style, their personal identity, and their past theatre-going on in-show sense-making are given particular attention. Spectators seem to orient their attention (toward stories, craft/process, or ‘real’ messages) and modes of engagement (affective, identificatory, or cognitive) in discrete ways that are especially shaped by their stage of life, real-life occupations, and degree of familiarity with theatre/artists. This project has sought to engage in a methodology that promotes the value of intercourse between quantitative, qualitative, and philosophical approaches to an emerging field of scholars and theatre-makers. To that end, tools are proposed for interrogating style and its dimensions (The Persuasively Inflected Theatre Scale); categorizing age, income, and theatre-going; and organizing the types of memories, questions, and forms of change spectators share.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".