A report on Virtual Reality (VR) in theatre history research:
Creating a spatial context for performance
Christie Carson
Department of Drama
Royal Holloway University of London c.carson@rhul.ac.uk
Carson, Christie. "A report on Virtual Reality (VR) in theatre history
research: Creating a spatial context for performance." Early Modern
Literary Studies Special Issue 13 (April, 2004): 2.1-12 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-13/carson>.
Theatre is most often thought of as a time-based event but it is also
undoubtedly a spatially-based one. Theatre history research has increasingly
been able to acknowledge the importance of space as a result, on the one
hand, of physical experiments, like the replica Globe theatre now standing
in South London, and, on the other, experiments using Virtual Reality (VR).
VR is a powerful tool for exploring a range of issues that have previously
been hard to tackle in theatre history. I will consider the ways that VR can
help to explain the spatial relationships in different theatres, how it can
illustrate creative practices and how it can be used to show changes made in
theatre buildings, past and present. The examples come from my work as
Principal Investigator of an Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB)
project called 'Designing Shakespeare: an audio visual archive, 1960-2000' [1].
VR can be used in exploratory approaches to theatrical production that
complicate and enrich our understanding of theatre history. I will argue
that, combined with current research practices and intellectual frameworks
borrowed from architecture and archaeology, this technology can shape the
future of the discipline of theatre history.
VR technology offers the opportunity to recreate not only a theatrical
space but also the scene changes, lighting states and the movements of
seating or the stage that practitioners employ to vary the actor-audience
relationship. It is common practice in theatre history to try to recover the
ephemeral event of performance using such materials as printed playtexts,
playbills, theatre programmes, interviews with participants, production
photographs, preparatory illustrations, theatre reviews and eyewitness
accounts of performance. These materials are usually drawn together with
information about the social and creative practices of the period to bring a
context to the information available for the specific performance event. My
first digital project in this area was The Cambridge King Lear
CD-ROM: Text and Performance History[2] that looked
at the worldwide English-language performance history of one play over 400
years. The disk drew together textual-historical and performance-historical
scholarship to build a picture of the performance life of the play, using
different kinds of evidence and interdisciplinary scholarly practices. The
materials included 10 published texts of the play and 500 images of the play
in performance, combined with extensive annotation and reference material.
This disk, then, represented a new way to present existing research
materials and practices.
'Designing Shakespeare', however, has taken the different approach of
using digital technology not only to improve access to existing material but
also to develop new kinds of research resource. Rather than follow one play
across its 400-year performance history, 'Designing Shakespeare' tracks all
professional productions of all the plays in the Shakespeare canon over 40
years of performance in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The archive
comprises 4 databases that work in combination to provide multiple means to
recreate the ephemeral temporal event of performance: i) a textual database
of production details and review extracts, ii) an image database of over
3500 production photographs, iii) a collection of video interviews with
theatre designers, and iv) a collection of VR models of the theatre spaces
in which Shakespeare has been performed.
Those who develop new ways of seeing old material must be aware of what is
lost in the transference from one medium to another. Because of the fluid
nature of the object of study in theatre history there are some who would
argue strongly against fixing any part of that event in a way that might
constrain future interpretation too narrowly. By its nature, simulation is a
process of simplification and it is tempting to smooth out areas of
scholarly contention. On the positive side, however, when used sensitively
simulation has the capacity to problematize those aspects of our current
thinking that we too easily forget to inspect. In theatre history we have to
attend to multiple temporal domains at once. One is the duration of the play
itself, from the 2 (or thereabouts) hours traffic from the beginning of Act
1 to the end of Act 5. Another temporal domain is the run of a single
production, which might include transfers, tours or remounts. This second
temporal domain encompasses all occurrences of a single creative
interpretation of the play which may or may not include a number of
different groups of participants. Yet another temporal domain is the
over-arching history of interpretation of a play from the time it was
written to the modern performance, encompassing substantial cultural and
social differences that bear upon meaning. To trace a play through a number
of different periods and places is one way in which cultural and social
changes can be illustrated, and this is of considerable importance to
historiography.
For the 'Designing Shakespeare' project, the theatre designer Chris Dyer
developed VR models of 9 theatres: in London, the Aldwych,
the Barbican, the Cottesloe,
Shakespeare's Globe, the Lyttleton,
and the Olivier, and, in
Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre,
the Swan and The
Other Place pre-1990 and The Other Place
post-1991. (Each underlined link in the previous sentence will take you
to the VR model of each theatre.) Three-dimensional VR models differ from
two-dimensional pictures in that the viewer may take up any viewpoint within
the model and the computer will generate what one would see when standing
(or, indeed, floating) at that point. Such models are an aid to visualizing
the physical challenges that theatre designers are faced with, but in some
respects the complete freedom to roam the performance space can inhibit an
appreciation of how theatrical practitioners understand their working
environment. For this reason it was decided to standardize two aspects
within each of the models. Firstly, to give a sense of scale relative to the
human body, three simulated actors form a triangle on the stage of the
acting space; their size and relative positions are constant across the
models. Secondly, each model is provided with a set of standard viewpoints
within the auditorium that illustrate the range of perspectives, and the
concomitant actor/audience distances, available from different positions
within each theatre.
The difference between sitting in an intimate theatre such as The Other
Place in Stratford and the vast expanse of the Olivier Theatre at the
National Theatre is best illustrated through a combination of scale actor
models on the stage and specific viewing points from the audience. For those
who cannot explore the VRML models provided, figures 1 and 2 are screenshots
of the viewpoint from analogous side-on positions in the auditorium.
(Figure 1. Screenshot of Chris Dyer's VRML model of The Other Place, Royal
Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, in its post-1991 configuration)
(Figure 2. Screenshot of Chris Dyer's VRML model of the Olivier Theatre at
the National Theatre, Southbank, London)
As well as indicating the constraints within which a particular designer had
to work on a particular production, this use of VR promotes a comparative
approach to the study of staging. Within such an ambition, the temptation to
make the actor models highly realistic--say to clothe them in Elizabethan
dress--should, we decided, be resisted; the ones shown here are deliberately
non-realistic so as not to impose a limitation on the kinds of performance
that the user might imagine within the space. We wanted to create the sense
of potential that a designer might experience coming into the space for the
first time, and indeed the 'Designing Shakespeare' project in general aimed
to add information through illustration and comparison in order to open up
possibilities rather than offering conclusions.
The VRML models for this project were generated from Dyer's much more
complex theatre design software called Open
Stages (based on OpenGL, not VRML) that not only allows movement with
the theatre space but also enables the creation of sets and lighting states
with their respective changes linked to temporal cues. Essentially, all the
key practices of modern theatre production are simulated. For the student
designer the ability to work in a range of theatres without restrictions of
time or money is greatly liberating, and for institutions that use the
software there is the advantage of providing experience of a wide range of
theatre spaces without having to maintain them or to insure those working
within them. The simulated experience of working in 9 large professional
theatres has never before been available to the practitioner, tutor, or
student.
Open Stages has specific
applications for the theatre historian and the theatre designer, and using
it Dyer carried out an AHRB-funded research project entitled 'Three Lears'
that simulated the designs for the play that he had created for 3 theatres
between 1985 and 1988. These were at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario,
in 1985 (directed by John Hirsch, with Douglas Campbell as King Lear), at
the Glasgow Theatre Royal, 1987 (directed by Don Taylor, with Anthony Quayle
as King Lear), and at the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Other Place, 1988
(directed by Cicely Berry, with Richard Haddon Haines as King Lear). Incomplete
as it currently is, the 'Three Lears' project indicates that VR offers an
entirely new way of documenting the work of theatre artists. Simulation of
this kind is a step towards the preservation of particular aspects of the
concrete experience of stage design. VR creates, in essence, an enhanced version
of the traditional 'model box'. Because it is not a recreation of the thing
itself such technology seems to be accepted by most designers as a valid means
of representing their work in another form. As in the 'Designing Shakespeare'
project, these models should be seen not in isolation but as part of an additional
layer of information that can be added to existing materials, such as production
photographs, reviews and accounts of practitioners.
Photographs will always be more useful than VR models in presenting close
detail, but conversely models can incorporate knowledge about movement and
light that a static image cannot hold. For example, as illustrated in
figures 3 and 4, Dyer's production of King Lear at The Other Place
featured a performance platform that cracked and split into three pieces,
representing the dissolution of the kingdom.
(Figure 3. King Lear at The Other Place, showing the performance
platform with divisions beginning to appear. Photograph: Chris Dyer)
(Figure 4. King Lear at The Other Place, showing the divided
kingdoms. Photograph: Chris Dyer)
As can be seen from figures 3 and 4, static photographs can give only an impression
of what the staging effect looked like at any one time, and even film/video
recording can capture the dynamic event from only one point-of-view. A simulated
archive of such a stage action, on the other hand, preserves the coup de
théâtre itself, and allows it to be repeatedly viewed from any point-of-view
in the theatre.
VR theatre models, then, can be used to contrast different performance
spaces and to document particular productions. Moreover, they can act as
archival tools that enable future generations to see the changes that have
been made to particular theatres over time. Such changes often reflect
changing audience preferences and changing commercial imperatives, and by
combining the models with information about theatrical policy and audience
responses we enhance the raw materials from which theatre history proceeds
as an academic endeavour. Indeed, university departments of drama and
theatre were not the first to discover the power and flexibility of VR
modelling: architecture and archaeology have been using the technology for
many years. In architecture, the concern has been to simulate before
construction, in other words to enhance our power to envisage a structure
that does not yet exist. As in theatre, VR technology allows the architect
to test ideas that would be far too expensive to try in reality, and to this
end the level of detail applied to a particular model is usually far greater
than we find necessary for theatre-historical work.
The methodological analogies between theatre-historical and archaeological
uses of VR are also instructive. The duration of an excavation is comparable
to the run of a production and in both there is a need to record the spatial
components of what happened and to link those to contextual information about
why it happened. In both disciplines, data are frequently incomplete and practitioners
must record precisely where inference and speculation are filling the gaps.
Of course, in such projects as the Shakespeare's Globe reconstruction archaeological
and theatre-historical specialisms came together because the building foundations
excavated in 1989-90 were those of a performance venue [3].
Opportunities for further interdisciplinary work between theatre historians
and archaeologists are becoming apparent. For example, the physical tests
that simulate the effects of wind passing through open-air buildings and of
the weathering of construction materials might usefully be applied to models
of no-longer existing theatres.
New research methods and new ways of teaching are bound to emerge from the
development of VR technology. The intellectual shift is likely to be
significant, but theatre is itself inherently a multimedia experience and we
may build on existing practices rather than starting out afresh. An approach
to theatre history that enables a scholar to engage with archival materials
that aim to recreate three-dimensional reality is necessarily different from
one devised only for work with documentary and pictorial evidence. With the
'Designing Shakespeare' project I tried to combine existing research
practices and materials with the new practices and materials using an
event-based intellectual framework developed from the archaeological model.
Whether this project will have the desired impact on research in this area
is yet to be seen. If it succeeds in raising fundamental questions about the
nature of the discipline then I will consider it a worthwhile experiment
even if the methodologies I advocate are not those adopted by the
profession.
Notes
1 The theatre models of the 'Designing
Shakespeare' project can be found on the 'Arts and Humanities Data
Service--Performance Arts' (AHDS Performance Arts) website at http://www.pads.ahds.ac.uk)
by clicking on 'Browse', 'Theatre Resources', 'Designing Shakespeare',
'Video, Audio and VRML Resources', and finally 'Theatre Virtual Reality
Models'. The individual models can also be found from links embedded in
paragraph 5 of this paper.
2 Christie Carson and Jackie Bratton, The Cambridge
King Lear CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
ISBN 052163640X.
3Gabriel Egan's essay
in this issue of EMLS is specially concerned with computer modelling
of the archaeology of the Globe playhouse.
Carson, Christie, and Jackie Bratton, The Cambridge King Lear
CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Egan, Gabriel. "The 1599 Globe and its modern replica: Virtual Reality
modelling of the archaeological and pictorial evidence." Early Modern
Literary Studies Special Issue 13 (April, 2004): 5.1-22 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-13/egan>.
Responses to this piece intended for the
Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at m.steggle@shu.ac.uk.
