Staging madness: dramatic modes of representing mental illness at The Workman Theatre Project, 1989-2001
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Toronto's Workman Theatre Project is a non-profit, performing arts company that integrates people who receive mental health services with the professional arts community. Fundamentally, the company seeks to imagine a reconstructed representation of mental illness on stage. Since its incorporation in 1991, the WTP has created over twenty theatrical productions, toured inter-provincially, provided performing arts training to hundreds of people, supported a playwrights' circle and acted as a centre for the exchange of professional and experiential perspectives on mental illness in the community. Over the years, company productions have used theatre to explore a wide range of issues related to mental illness. These include, for example, schizophrenia and the use of police force, cross-cultural conceptions of mental illness and Japanese-Canadian immigrant experience, the role of the asylum in local history, and depression in view of the decision to use or not use antidepressants. By examining the WTP's history, practice and several important productions, it is possible to elucidate emerging strategies in the company's work for representing mental illness. Broadly, these strategies have tended to privilege voices of particular experiences of mental illness and emphasize infinite variety rather than stability within these experiences. The company's representations have also challenged traditional aesthetic stereotypes about madness and disrupted the historical patterns for mental illness representation outlined by such cultural theorists as Sander Gilman, Lillian Feder and Roy Porter. This thesis seeks to understand these representational strategies, compare them one with another, and examine their place within the theatre's history. Research for this thesis is based on materials from the company's archives, critical press, related theoretical material and interviews with WTP members, staff and associated artists.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".