Bibliographic record
Abstract
Community-Engaged Theatre Audiences is an intervention into the reception of politically motivated, community-centered plays. This thesis aims to understand how individuals make meaning or sense out of these complicated sites of performance. It asks “what can scholars and artists learn about community-engaged theatre by asking audience members about their experiences?” Community-engaged theatre is an umbrella term that contains a multitude of theatrical practices, where theatre artists work with members of a community to create performance texts that in some way depict the community, taking up the community’s concerns and grappling with the community’s future. These plays are social justice initiatives, working within dynamic communities to foster social change. This study is predicated on the understanding that communities are neither fixed nor stable, but are rather emerging and constructed. Community-Engaged Theatre Audiences offers empirical audience data to scholars and artists of community-engaged theatre in an effort to understand more fully this performance genre as it is practiced now, both in contemporary southern Ontario specifically, and in Western, English theatre more broadly. This thesis presents three case studies of new Canadian plays, each one employing a contrasting set of dramaturgical practices: verbatim theatre, physical comedy, and site-specific theatre. The plays are Stories from the Generation Gap, by Cameron Crookston,Common Boots Theatre’s The Public Servant by Jennifer Brewin, Haley McGee, Sarah McVie, ii and Amy Rutherford, and finally, A Simple Twist of Faith by Evan and Rafe Malach. Each case study presents an analytical review of audience reflections in order to offer a rich, local understanding of each play, while revealing the fluidity of belonging and the gap between the communities hailed through the performance and the lived realities of the audience members in attendance. This study investigates multiple perspectives from audience members, bringing their language and reflection to the analysis of each play. Community-engaged theatre as a genre is more deeply understood through an analysis of audience member’s responses to specific exemplars. Audiences are so often erased or simply absent from archives and theatre scholarship. This thesis centers their voices in order to understand better community-engaged theatre as an advocacy project.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.002 |
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".