Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces by Joanne Tompkins (review)

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• Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces by Joanne Tompkins
• Sarah Bay-Cheng

VISUALISING LOST THEATRES: VIRTUAL PRAXIS AND THE RECOVERY OF PERFORMANCE SPACES. By Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, and Liyang Xia. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; pp. 211.

Over the past twenty years, practices associated with the digital humanities have become more common in theatre and performance studies, as scholars engaged modes of research, analysis, and publication beyond the printed text. Even prior to widespread digital tools, theatre historians drew on communication technologies—photography, radio, film, video—to capture, analyze, replay, and convey past performances. Each technological advance added new dimensions to the multisensory experience of performance, including sound and movement captured in increasing detail and scope. Resources such as Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library, theatre documentaries circulating on VHS, or a variety of bootlegs illicitly copied and recopied for theatre history classes added to the formal and informal networks of theatre history recordings. With the advent of digital recordings, the internet, and virtual environments, both the documentation and scholarship circulated more broadly.

Yet, even as theatre recordings proliferated throughout the twentieth century, the discourse around them focused primarily on their lack of fidelity to the original performances. In the early 2000s, this emphasis began to change as scholarly narratives drew attention to the role that performance recordings and reenactments play as evidence in historical theatre narratives. Books ranging from Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) to Toni Sant’s Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving (2017) explore how digital technologies create different kinds of performance records. The last ten years have seen the most significant shifts, as theatre scholars engaged the digital humanities to create resources beyond the printed book in digital projects such as Jennifer Roberts-Smith’s Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) and the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP), among others. Published in 2021, Miguel Escobar Varela’s Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research provides an excellent overview with detailed explanations of this emerging field’s best practices. Drawing on both his own work and others’, Varela documents how researchers integrate digital methods and technologies into the study of theatrical performance.

The coauthored book Visualising Lost Theatres joins these projects and publications as a cogent example of how such methods advance our understanding of the theatrical past through detailed case studies that bring theoretical inquiries to bear on specific projects. The book emerges from the authors’ respective and collaborative research areas, and in conjunction with the development of the VR environment Ortelia, it demonstrates how historians and audiences can digitally reconstruct and, importantly, reexperience theatrical spaces such as the Rose Theatre in the UK and other cultural heritage sites. Three of the book’s coauthors—Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, and Joanne Tompkins—have previously collaborated on digital humanities projects, including A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (2016) with Frode Helland. Tompkins has led the development of the virtual environment Ortelia for more than a decade (cf. Tompkins and Delbridge, Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, 2009), including its development for a range of gallery and cultural environments.

Visualizing Lost Theatres details both theoretical and practical approaches to virtual reality (VR) reconstructions as reenactments and speculative reimaginings of historical theatre spaces. The authors detail how the virtual environment of a specific theatre can not only facilitate a deeper and more [End Page 115] nuanced understanding of the past but also cultivate new performances through motion capture and the participation of “actor-researchers” working within the virtual models. The experience of the past and its imaginative re-creation provide historical insights into both the actions onstage and possible reactions among audiences. The book’s multimodal scholarship echoes the dynamism of performance, affording historians and their audiences new perspectives within historical models and contexts.

Visualising Lost Theatres is simply and intuitively structured, opening with a clear and compelling introduction to the ideas, history, and practices detailed within it, followed by case studies and a brief conclusion. The five case...