Devising Systems: Towards a Formal Appraisal of Group-based Collaborative Devising
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A formal appraisal of group-based devising in theatre is long overdue. For all the scholarly attention paid to devising groups and their unique practices over the last four-plus decades, there has been little consideration of devising’s more general and systematic attributes. Such a gap in scholarship constrains the scope of discourse in the field while effectively abandoning the practical sphere to work without critical or conceptual support to orient their practice. The current work addresses this gap by locating a consistent general form at the foundation of devising practices, offering orientation for practitioners in an ambiguous and often puzzling creative endeavour. This is accomplished via two significant literature reviews that uncover and compile attributes and practices consistent across group-based devising, which taken together present a general pattern. This study then uses the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann to analyze this pattern, illustrating how groups devising collaboratively can be understood as operating as a system with the goal orientation of devising performance. This assertion offers context to explain elements of group behaviour, while also presenting the dynamic of a system tasked with creative activity. This systems framework is then applied to case studies from the work of Toronto’s [elephants] collective to demonstrate how it serves to clarify practice. In sum, this dissertation offers scholars and practitioners tools with which to understand and organize group-based creative practices, foregrounding the conditions experienced by all devising groups creating performance (time, communication, structure, interpenetration and the coordination of action), while illuminating how to reconcile a group’s formal foundation with their creative activities.
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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 | 0.039 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.019 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".