Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces

Description

This pioneering study harnesses virtual reality to uncover the history of five venues that have been 'lost' to us: London's 1590s Rose Theatre; Bergen's mid-nineteenth-century Komediehuset; Adelaide's Queen's Theatre of 1841; circus tents hosting Cantonese opera performances in Australia's goldfields in the 1850s; and the Stardust showroom in 1950s Las Vegas. Shaping some of the most enduring genres of world theatre and cultural production, each venue marks a significant cultural transformation, charted here through detailed discussion of theatrical praxis and socio-political history. Using virtual models as performance laboratories for research, Visualising Lost Theatres recreates the immersive feel of venues and reveals performance logistics for actors and audiences. Proposing a new methodology for using visualisations as a tool in theatre history, and providing 3D visualisations for the reader to consult alongside the text, this is a landmark contribution to the digital humanities.

Joanne Tompkins is Professor Emerita at the University of Queensland, Australia. She has published widely in theatre studies, especially on spatiality and theatre, and on cultural politics in theatre. She has won awards for her research and her editing, and the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies offers an editing award named in her honour. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London in 2015 and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. She founded Ortelia, a company which provides virtual reality models of examples of cultural heritage, and she is a co-founder of AusStage (with Julie Holledge). Julie Holledge is Professor Emerita of Drama at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Her international standing as a scholar has been recognised through appointments as a 'Distinguished Professor' at the Open University of Hong Kong, and as a Professor II at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. She recently completed three collaborative book projects, Ibsen on Theatre (2018), A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (2016; with Bollen and Tompkins), and Ibsen Between Cultures (2016). She has directed 22 professional theatre productions in the UK and Australia. In 2017, she was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Jonathan Bollen is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at UNSW Sydney, Australia. His research interests include performance and desire, popular entertainment, international touring, and digital methods for research. He is the author of Touring Variety in the Asia Pacific Region, 1946-1975 (2020), and co-author of A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (2016) and Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s (2008). His experience in the digital humanities includes developing data models for theatre research, mapping the distribution of performance, and visualising networks of artistic collaboration. Liyang Xia is Associate Professor at the Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research areas include the reception history of Henrik Ibsen's drama in China, Chinese traditional theatre and its practice both historically and in contemporary China, and modern adaptations of Ibsen's drama around the world. She is co-editor of the journal Ibsen Studies as well as Contemporary Theatre Review's online journal Interventions.

Visualising Lost Theatres makes a major contribution to the fields of both Theatre Studies and Digital Humanities. Readers are invited to imagine anew the 'lost' theatres of the book's title, from the Rose in 1590s London to the Stardust Hotel in 1950s Las Vegas. The authors' use of digital tools and methods to explore those venues allows them to offer new ways to understand canonical figures such as Shakespeare and Ibsen, while also highlighting the importance of other forms of live performance such as Cantonese opera. The book ranges across many fields - architecture, tourism, digital culture heritage, translation, and more - but its contribution to Theatre Studies is particularly immense, not just expanding what we know but providing new tools and methods for future research. Patrick Lonergan, NUI Galway