This project brings together a diverse array of scholars from around the country, including computer scientists, 3D modellers and animators, theater practioners, and theater and music historians. The objective is to use digital technology to address a problem fundamental to performance scholarship and pedagogy: how to represent and communicate the phenomenon of live performance using media. This problem becomes especially pressing when the objective is to represent a performance tradition from the past. Neither a written description nor a filmed recreation is capable of conveying the experience of attending a live performance, an experience that encompasses not only the way the performance on stage looks and sounds from the perspective of spectators in different parts of the theatre, but also spectator's perceptions of and interactions with one another.
Our proposed solution to this problem is to recreate historical performances in a virtual reality environment. The central objective is to simulate a feeling of "liveness" in this environment: the sensation of being surrounded by human activity onstage, in the audience and backstage, and the ability to choose where to look at any given time (onstage or off) and to move within the environment. With respect to the performers themselves, a critical concern is to find a way to bring the nuances of great stage performances into the virtual environment. To this end, we propose to use motion capture technology to capture real-world performances by professional, highly skilled actors, singers, dancers, acrobats and musicians.
Key to our project is the depth of the proposed collaboration between technology, scholarship, pedagogy and art. This project is conceived to make a significant contribution to all four domains simultaneously, rather than merely using any one in the service of the others. The end result will represent an important advance in the design and implementation of virtual environments, building on recent successes in creating photo-realistic simulations of real 3D environments. The scale of this simulation, and in particular the complexity and precision of the character animation, pose an important technical challenge: how to integrate the complex pre-defined motion capture-generated animations of the onstage performances with the autonomous behaviors of characters in the audience and backstage.The project also constitute an invaluable work of applied scholarship, an unprecedented resource for visualizing past performances and testing hypotheses about historical performance practices. It will provide an unprecedented resource for students to engage with historical performance traditions as performance (and not as literature or film). Finally, from an artistic perspective, the Virtual Vaudeville project will test the potential of virtual environments to provide truly high-quality theater experiences to remote audiences. ~
