"Fitful excellences": the Great Canadian Theatre Company and English-speaking Ottawa theatre, 1975--1983
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The primary aim of this study is a critical survey of the Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC) during the "founding" years of 1975 to 1983. Over the course of this period the GCTC went through its most fundamental changes, which were fuelled by an underlying conflict. At the root of this conflict were two contesting mandates. The central objective of the first mandate was to produce a particular kind of Canadian theatre and, to a lesser extent, promote Canadian culture in general. This mandate was divided into two ventures. The first was an ongoing resistance to the encroachment into Canada of American, and, to a lesser extent British, culture in favour of the nurturing of a "Canadian" culture. This second venture sought not only to produce Canadian drama, but Canadian drama that was considered to be "socially relevant". The central objective of the second mandate was to address issues that directly affected the people of Ottawa using the principles of "social justice". The appeal of the company in this phase was its close connection and its commitment to various activist communities in the city, as opposed to acting on the larger objectives of cultural nationalism. The main project of this mandate was to conceive and produce plays that addressed issues and events that were uppermost in the minds of people who shared similar politics as the members of the company. These issues and events were located both inside and outside the country, which constituted one of the major breaks with the founding mandate. This study will examine the GCTC's gradual shift from the first mandate to the second mandate during the period in question. This study also examines the brief existence of two other Ottawa-based companies, The Penguin Theatre (PTC) (1976--1983) and Theatre 2000 (T2000) (1978--1983). Through an examination of the work of these theatres I will argue that during the brief time all three were in existence (GCTC, PTC and T2000) from 1978 to 1983 they constituted an avant-garde movement that posed a serious challenge to the National Arts Centre and the amateur companies in English-speaking Ottawa.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".