Abstract
The Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) offers an alternative to static,
two-dimensional visualizations of theatrical text by modeling the process of
moving from text to performance in the Western, text-based tradition of live
theatre production. Its interface links a three-dimensional ‘Stage View’
populated by character avatars to a ‘Text View’ enhanced with text visualization
tools by means of a central ‘Line of Action’ analogous to a timeline. All three
parts of the interface can be edited; edits in any individual section appear in
the others; and all three can be played back simultaneously. While emphasizing
that the traditional medium of theatrical performance is the actor’s body moving
in time and space, and providing a digital analogue for that medium, the system
also frees users from the limitations of the single, time-bound spectator’s
perspective. Potential applications include theatre analysis, theatre pedagogy,
and preparation for theatrical production.
Introduction: Visualizing Theatrical Text
This paper describes the design evolution of our Simulated Environment for
Theatre (SET), a visualization system that conceives of theatrical text as a
flexible process or technology [
Worthen 2010] occupying time and
three-dimensional space, rather than a fixed entity that can be captured in
two-dimensional media. The impetus for the project was our curiosity about how
digital media might enable uniquely theatrical uses of theatrical text; that is:
we began with the question, “what do scholars and artists do with scripts, and
can any of these things be done better in digital media than they can be
done in print or manuscript”? We are less interested in solving a problem
with existing uses of text than we are in extending the affordance of digital
media. As Brett D. Hirsch [
Hirsch 2011] has recently pointed out,
digital editions of theatrical text ought to be able to do things that print
editions cannot do; yet to date, most digital editions of plays (largely as a
result of anxiety about their scholarly reception) adapt print conventions only
very conservatively. To describe this trend in functional terms, existing
digital editions of theatrical texts help readers to conduct textual
scholarship: to understand, analyze, interpret, and trace the bibliographic and
interpretive histories of printed texts; but we wondered, by contrast, how we
might help users conduct theatrical creation and scholarship: to analyze a text
for theatrical action; to conceptualize a production of a text; and to visualize
the relationships between text and other spatial and temporal elements that
function semiotically in theatrical performance.
It will be obvious that our understanding of “theatre” has been grounded
throughout this project in the live, Western “dramatic” tradition, because
the role of text in that tradition is so central. Reaching all the way back to
Aristotle as our earliest point of reference, we think of this kind of
theatrical text as a means of recording a central theatrical action, a major
change in the world of a play, which is in process throughout a performance.
This action begins at a play’s beginning and ends at its end; in performance, it
is intelligible in the play’s plot, which is in turn expressed through the
arrangement of material elements of production (bodies, objects, sound, light)
in time and space. Aristotle’s tragedy – in performance – is hence a “
mimesis of an action”
[
Aristotle 1997, 67]. We have found Canadian theatre director
Richard Rose’s explicit application of Aristotelian analysis in production
particularly helpful in elucidating the role of theatrical action in a theatre
creation process [
Rose 2009]. Rose describes a play’s “line of
action” as its organizing principle, on the basis of which all the
material manifestations of the performed work can be selected and deployed. He
encourages his directing students to define a line of action in terms of a
single verb that describes as precisely as possible the change in the play world
effected by the action between its beginning and its end. On the basis of that
concrete description of an overall change, directors can develop design and
choreographic metaphors to materialize it, and can guide actors to choices that
further its incremental progress from moment to moment in a production. Rose’s
methodology has been especially useful in illustrating for us how the Western
“dramatic” theatre both privileges text as a primary means of access to
the organizing principle of a stable work of art and also positions it in
performance as only one among a range of adaptable and manipulable semiotic
elements of production. Among contemporary theorists of theatrical text and
performance, Rose’s approach aligns most closely with that of William Worthen
[
Worthen 2010], who argues that this tension in the nature of
a theatrical text is a consequence of its simultaneous identity both as tool for
communicating a work of theatre and as a technology for creating it:
Tools always have an immediate purpose,
are used to accomplish a specific task. Like tools, texts can be made to
function in socially accredited ways, in illicit ways, and in ways that
require a new technological adaptation, require us to rethink the technology
and the work it accomplishes. You can use a screwdriver to drive a screw, or
to open a paint can... Driving a screw, opening a paint can, ballasting a
sculpture, stealing a car, killing someone: each use of the tool engages a
different sociability, a different conduct of technology….the utility of
dramatic writing lies in the perception of what kinds of activity,
performance, doing something, those properties might afford in the social
technology of the theatre. [Worthen 2010, 21–22]
Our aim, then, in designing the SET system, has been to enable the analysis and
application of the technological function of theatrical text in the social
context of the theatre, rather than to represent any individual theatrical text,
material witness to it, interpretation of it, or historical perspective on it.
The approach we have taken to designing SET differs considerably from our first
approach to theatrical text visualization, a prototype system called Watching
the Script, which was designed primarily as a reading tool to enhance students’
understanding of play-texts. In what follows here, we explain the ways in which
Watching the Script, despite its use of moving “character” dots on a
“stage” seen in ground plan, nonetheless parallels four major
print-based trends we have encountered in digital text visualization (we
categorize these as print analogy, analytic visualization, literal illustration,
and production illustration). Our departures from these trends in the new design
for SET include the system’s navigable three-dimensional Stage View, which
accommodates a variety of production elements linked directly to the central
organizing principle of a Line of Action, visualized as a kind of time line.
Text, which is linked to the Stage View through the Line of Action, is as
flexible and penetrable as any other performance phenomenon in the Stage View.
The interface also incorporates a set of specific sets and stages, consisting of
three-dimensional models of real spaces created to scale, so that the adoption
of the SET tool involves an awareness of an actual performance environment
rather than a single stylized space. Users can move avatars around in the Stage
View’s three-dimensional spaces and play text and action back in real time.
While the new design has the potential to be useful to three constituencies of
users – theatre researchers, theatre students, and theatre creators – our pilot
user study has indicated that a more intuitive interface and a broader range of
performance-related functions would enhance the system. In future development,
we are particularly interested in exploring the system’s capacity to represent
non-textual records of theatrical production, as well as less traditional
theatrical works, including works that emphasize non-textual elements of
performance, mediated performances, and other works that might be described as
“post-dramatic” theatre [
Lehmann 2006].
Watching the Script (WTS): a two-dimensional visualization
Our first prototype, Watching the Script, was conceived primarily as a reading
tool. Its interface visualizes theatrical text in the three Views illustrated in
Figure 1.
The “Overview” panel on the left side of the screen represents an entire
theatrical text in a single microtext column [
Ruecker, Homich and Sinclair 2005]. The
Overview can be used to illustrate important structural patterns at a glance.
For example, each character’s lines can be rendered in a different colour to
illustrate the relative importance of characters in terms of line-count,
frequency of appearance, or presence in different parts of a play, or to reveal
patterns in the co-occurrence of characters that might suggest the development
of relationships over the play as a whole. Other tools permit users to select
and view patterns in scene locations and act and scene breaks.
The “Reading View” panel, second to left, shows portions of the text at a
scale appropriate for reading; the context includes the moment currently visible
on the primary “Stage View” on the right. The same visualization tools
available in the Overview can also be applied to the Reading View, so that, for
example, speech headings for a character's lines are rendered in the same colour
used to represent that character in the Overview. Users are thereby offered
visual cues to help situate the textual details of a particular passage in the
context of the larger patterns of the play as a whole.
The “Stage View” separates the text into speeches and associates them with
coloured dots representing the characters that deliver them. On a separate
interface, users can define a movement for each character-dot around a stylized
stage seen in ground-plan, as the text of that character's speeches scrolls; one
movement is possible for each speech. By liberating speeches from their
typographical sequence and associating them instead with mobile character dots,
the Stage View focuses attention on even smaller units of text and emphasizes
the relationship between text and speaker. Non-speaking characters remain on
stage, but are grayed out in order to retain focus on the current speaker. In
combination, the features of the Stage View create a visual argument [
Galey and Ruecker 2009] that the speech – the coherent, discrete utterance of
a single character, regardless of length – is the basic unit of a theatrical
text. The Stage View provides a visual metaphor for the act of speaking in
turns.
The premise that one discrete, continuous utterance of a single character
(regardless of its length) is the basic unit of a theatrical work is
fundamentally typographical in nature. It extrapolates the aesthetic structure
of a theatrical text from its representation in print and manuscript
reproductions: because the words on a page are separated by character names, the
smallest unit of visual space is a complete utterance; because speeches are
delineated by changes in names, speeches are ontologically defined by character;
hence character utterances are the basic unit of a theatrical text. This
two-dimensional approach to visualizing theatrical text as “the act of
speaking in turns” is limited in obvious ways: even on its own terms, it
cannot represent more complex verbal interactions between characters, such as
overlapping dialogue or eavesdropping; but more importantly, it is not flexible
or sensitive enough to performance conditions to engage the technological nature
of theatrical text.
Watching the Script and traditional approaches to visualizing text
Most digital visualizations of text – theatrical and non-theatrical – are
similarly concerned with the arrangement of information in configurations
analogous to those found in familiar material media. We have encountered four
major strategies or streams of approach.
Digital analogues for print editions
First, and most common, is the ubiquitous digital analogy for print or
manuscript most obviously represented by documents prepared using word
processing software. This approach imitates the visual appearance of print
or manuscript: the default setting of a word-processor's window in the
English-speaking world, for example, yields a two-dimensional image of black
letters arranged sequentially in lines from left to right and top to bottom
on a white rectangle; the relationship between words and background can be
set to represent the relative proportions of various fonts and margins on
various sizes of paper. Often the digital analogy for paper is enhanced with
navigational tools (such as hyperlinks, search functions, and zoom
features), and sometimes non-print media are embedded into paper-analogue
frames. YouTube is an obvious example, in which windows containing
time-based media appear in a two-dimensional, static white background
populated with black text; Sophie, a software system for creating,
“reading”, and annotating multimedia digital “books”
demonstrates a more sophisticated version of the same principle (it
similarly uses a static, two dimensional background with designated areas
for other kinds of media, including hyperlinking and collaborative authoring
tools); Wysiwyg Web Builder provides a 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get' system
for creating web pages that can also accommodate forms, PayPal, and RSS
functions. But these features are enhancements to print format rather than
violations of it, operating like traditional tables of contents, indexes,
annotations, or figures. Digital editions of theatrical works such as the
Internet Shakespeare Editions' annotated
As You Like
It
[
Bevington, ed. 2007] and the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare
Project's multi-media Interactive Folio edition of
Romeo and Juliet
[
Fischlin 2007] take advantage of opportunities like these to
illustrate textual variants, provide historical context, or even present
performance records from a range of productions. The Reading View of
Watching the Script also operates in this way. It divides a text into
passages of manageable length on a readable scale, minimally interfering
with the integrity of the text as a whole in order to make it more
accessible to readers, and in doing so maintains print's typographical
visualization of characters speaking in turns.
Analytic visualization
A second approach to digital text visualization deconstructs and re-assembles
texts to reveal patterns not visible within the confines of a single page or
window and then communicates the emergent patterns metaphorically in the
form of graphs, images, or concordances. This is essentially an analytic
approach to text visualization, described by Brent Nelson [
Nelson 2008] as the digital evolution of the disassembly and
reassembly of material artifacts that has been historically typical of
humanities research. An example from a theatre-related discipline is
ScriptGeist, a film pre-production software system that extracts mentions of
props, costumes, locations, and other material and logistical details from
scripts and re-assembles them into lists for distribution to various
production departments [
McKie 2007]. More innovative digital
visualizations communicate textual patterns in intuitive, challenging, and
aesthetically pleasing ways. Mandala, for example, a rich prospect
browser
[1] for exploring text collections more intuitively than traditional
interfaces can, allows users to upload texts (including theatrical texts),
weight criteria for word-searches, and view results in circular patterns
[
Sinclair, et al. 2009]. But the analytic approach nonetheless
maintains the analogy to print and manuscript formats. Like those formats,
its essential paradigm is the arrangement of information in two dimensional
space. It deconstructs the arrangement of words on a two dimensional page
and re-arranges the same words into new patterns in similar two-dimensional
spaces, patterns familiar from print and manuscript such as tables, figures,
graphs, two-dimensional images, and so on. Although the goal of re-arranging
the original text is to offer an alternative representation of the same
content, emphasizing patterns not readily discernible but nonetheless
present in the original text, the result of the process is an entirely new
text, often non-narrative or even non-syntactical in nature.
Watching the Script takes an analytic approach to visualization in its
Overview panel, its features for associating character and colour, and its
features for highlighting or excerpting certain kinds of text such as all
text belonging to one character. While there are clear benefits to this
approach, the casualties to the intended technological function of a
theatrical text are especially apparent in this last case: if the actor
playing Romeo has only his own lines for the Capulet ball scene to study, he
doesn’t know, for example, that he and the actor playing Juliet are together
speaking a sonnet, an elevated poetic form which signals that this new
romantic connection extends beyond the whimsical romantic intrigues of
Romeo’s past (1.4.206-223). Analytic visualization reduces rather than
enhances the intended functionality of a theatrical text as a theatre
technology.
Literal illustration
A third common approach to digital visualization of both theatrical and
non-theatrical texts participates in the long tradition of literalizing
images described in or suggested by a text. Sometimes the elements
illustrated are individual characters, objects, or events, as in Michael
Lahanas' interpretive drawing of the shield of Achilles posted with a
translation of Homer’s description of it from book 18 of the Iliad [
Lahanas 2006]. Sometimes literal illustrations are symbolic or
emblematic schemas synthesizing a variety of moments or ideas in a single
two-dimensional frame, visual “confections”, to use Edward Tufte’s term
[
Tufte 1998], such as the promotional posters for Baz
Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet [
Bazmark Films 1996]. A third strategy
selects and extracts a sequence of events or movements of characters or
objects as described or implied by a text, and plots them through
two-dimensional space over time, providing a kind of kinetic summary of a
textual work. Homer’s Trojan Theatre, for example, allows users to watch
icons representing ships and armies move through the of battles of the
Trojan war on a simplified map almost in ground-plan [
Clay and Kenan 2007]. Since they re-organize their originals, we might even think of these
latter two forms of literal illustration as literal, illustrative analytics.
Multi-media illustrations -- movie trailers, for example -- often combine
literal illustrative techniques to create analytic, kinetic confections.
Most software designed to assist in motion picture pre-visualization or
storyboarding operates as illustration: images representing shooting
locations defined in the equivalent of stage directions, and sometimes also
the arrangement of characters against these backgrounds, are organized in
visual sequences analogous to the traditional storyboards used to plan the
visual progression of a film. One example of such software is Celtx [
Celtx 2010]; FrameForge Previz Studio [
Schafer 2010] is a more sophisticated version, incorporating
3-D images embedded in two-dimensional frames; and the movie-making
simulation game
Moviestorm
[
Moviestorm Ltd. 2012] operates on similar principles.
The Stage View in Watching the Script attempts a limited stylized
literalization of textual images in its association of character dots with
characters’ speeches. In supplanting the typographical arrangement of the
text it represents, it, like other literal visualizations, distorts its
source text at the same time as enriching and augmenting it. Magnificent
though a drawing of Achilles' shield can be, it cannot capture the lines and
letters that indicate the rhythms and other sound-patterns of Homer's verse
and through them the connotative visceral and intellectual meanings
essential to the work as a whole. Nor, taken out of context, can a drawing
of the shield effect the sudden shift in a reader's imaginative experience
from syntagmatic progress through the epic to paradigmatic expansion of the
lyric moment in which the symbolic object is encountered. On the other hand,
the visualization adds specificity and detail not necessarily included in
the original, and helps a novice reader understand the detail that is
included in it. Similarly, animated maps and movie trailers do not
necessarily aim to create rich epic or theatrical experiences of the
inexorable accumulation of horrors – visitations from gods, violations of
the bodies of heroes, illicit sexual encounters, murders of cousins,
concealment in tombs, resurrections from the dead; instead, their concerns
are traffic patterns and release dates.
Any literal, illustrative approach to text visualization can represent a part
or an analysis or an interpretation of a printed textual work, demonstrably
faithful to something in the original work, whether that be its material
appearance (type, page, layout) or its contents (word, commentary, image,
event, pattern), or both. No method of literal illustration of a theatrical
text can faithfully represent a work of theatre, however, neither its
material appearance nor its contents. Theatrical text is clearly intended to
lead to a visualization of some kind, a material manifestation of something
suggested by the text, but not to a literal visualization of the world of
the play. Rather, a theatrical text is intended to lead to another material
manifestation of the work, a theatrical production in which characters
embodied by living actors move around on a three-dimensional stage in real
time and space before an audience. That visualization is in turn intended to
suggest the world and action of the play, making the work of theatre
imaginatively present in the minds of an audience. Since theatrical texts
rarely literally describe stages, but instead describe the fictions that
staging is in turn intended to describe, a literal illustration of a
theatrical texts skips over its performativity altogether; it treats text
not as a performance technology, but as another, non-technological form of
literature.
[2] To the extent
that theatrical texts are intended for performance, they, unlike other kinds
of texts, require the addition of representational elements other than those
that can be supplied imaginatively by readers. Even a theatrical work whose
primary mode of expression is verbal must necessarily incorporate elements
other than text. Literal illustration alters theatrical text at the
ontological level.
Production illustration
In response to this challenge, modern print and digital editions take a
fourth approach to visualizing theatrical text, incorporating images of
theatrical production rather than literal illustrations of the text. Jill L.
Levenson's introduction to the recent Oxford edition of
Romeo and Juliet
[
Shakespeare 2000], for example, includes eight illustrations
of stage productions and two of films [
Zeffirelli 1968], [
Lurhmann 1996]. Other print series such as Cambridge's
Shakespeare in Production interpolate notes on and images of stage
production into the text itself (see [
Shakespeare 2002]). The
online Internet Shakespeare Editions provides a broader collection of
records in a searchable database embedded in a separate section of the site;
it functions somewhat like an appendix to the text [
Prescott 2009]. A number of Peter S. Donaldson's projects,
including the
Shakespeare Electronic Archive,
Shakespeare in Asia,
Hamlet on the Ramparts, and his Cross-Media Annotation System
(XMAS) explore new ways of linking and integrating performance records and
texts [
Donaldson 2011a], [
Donaldson 2011b], [
MIT Shakespeare Project]. By representing a variety of productions in relation to
an individual text, these approaches to visualization implicitly acknowledge
that no individual illustration of an individual production should be
privileged. Accepting the premise that different productions of
Romeo and Juliet can represent the same work, they
provide a variety of alternative visualizations for comparison.
Nonetheless, no group of contrasting production records can be said to
visualize the work any more than any individual production record does.
Production records participate in the same conventions as other material
media, and perhaps more importantly, by providing a set of alternative
illustrations for the same single text, groups of contrasting production
records privilege the printed text as the locus of the work. Even editions
that include extended representations of alternate texts (see Levenson's
inclusion of the entire first Quarto of
Romeo and
Juliet
[
Shakespeare 2000], for example, or the Internet Shakespeare
Editions' inclusion of early variants of the plays [
Best 2005]) treat texts as coherent entities derived from print sources. Production
records, on the other hand, are fragmented excerpts, arguing that coherence
lies outside or between those records rather than in any individual
production that may be represented by one or another of them. Visualized in
this way, the theatrical work is still, ultimately, conceived as a complete
and stable textual entity.
Re-visualizing theatrical text
Watching the Script, our initial prototype for visualizing theatrical text,
employs methods of visualization analogous to those used in familiar material
media in its Stage View; consequently, it cannot visualize the technological
nature of theatrical text. To create a digital visualization of theatrical text
without misrepresenting its defining characteristic, we have attempted instead
to visualize the process of moving from text to performance.
Precedents
There are some precedents for a technological approach to visualizing
theatrical text in digital media. Michael Best, Stewart Arneil, and Martin
Holmes' Scenario [
Best, Arneil and Holmes 2002] enables students to create
blocking tableaux of scenes from Shakespeare's plays by placing characters
in fixed positions on a two-dimensional perspective-drawing of a stage
similar to the Globe theatre. Each frame can be annotated with explanatory
notes. Larry Friedlander's TheatreGame [
Friedlander 1991]
allows students to make audio recordings of scenes, program synchronized
stage action in a 2.5D graphical interface (a pseudo 3D or ¾ perspective
such as that used commonly in first-person shooter computer games), and play
back the virtual 'scene' created. Both systems acknowledge the spatial
medium of theatrical performance by offering a visual analogue for
three-dimensional space; Scenario invests more fully in the specificity of
the performance space, whereas TheatreGame acknowledges time as a
performance medium. Both also engage users in activities that imitate a
theatre artist's evolving use of theatrical space through a rehearsal
process, Scenario emphasizing the analytical and interpretive activities of
a director in its annotation function, and TheatreGame emphasizing the
actor's work by having students record audio performances of scenes. Credo
Interactive's DanceForms system for choreographing dance implies a
relationship between tools and technologies of performance by presenting a
view of a choreographic record in the same interface as a view of avatars
executing the choreography [
Credo Interactive 2009]. However, none of
these systems makes an explicit visual argument about the nature of the
relationship between theatrical text and performance in its interface
design.
The Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)
Our new prototype adopts some of the same principles as these systems, but
offers a different range of functions in response to our thinking about the
nature of theatrical text. The Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) is
shown in Figure 2.
SET offers a centrally-placed visualization of a line of action in the form
of a horizontal image analogous to a timeline. The Line of Action links a
Reading View in the lower half of the screen to a Stage View consisting of a
three-dimensional scale model of an actual venue and set populated by
abstracted character avatars in the upper half of the screen. The user’s
agency is emphasized in that users can upload, edit, and annotate all
aspects of the Stage View, Line of Action, and Reading View, including the
texts and stage and set models used, and the movements of
“characters” on the stage. The Line of Action can be
broken down by users into smaller units of action, ranging in size from acts
to scenes to French scenes (delineated by the entrance or exit of a
character) to speeches to individual “beats” of dramatic action. Users
define divisions between units of action by associating them with words,
stage directions, or intervals between words and stage directions in the
Reading View, or with character movements in the Stage View. All three views
can be edited in the main interface; edits made in one view affect the
others; and all three views scroll simultaneously during playback. In other
words, the system treats units of action, rather than individual characters'
speeches, as the basic units of the works visualized.
In each individual view, additional features serve the new paradigm. The
Reading View shifts primary ontological integrity to the line of action
rather than the text. The text in the Reading View can be cut, augmented
with stage business, expanded with textual additions, and annotated; but any
and all of these alterations are linked to (and hence metaphorically
justified by) actions in the continuous Line of Action. The Reading View
also emphasizes the embodied nature of text by placing it next to a
Character Panel, which visualizes the presence or absence of characters
during the passage shown in the Text Panel, whether they are speaking or
silent. Our revised Stage View attempts to visualize the materialization of
a theatrical text in fuller and more concrete terms than our first model
did. Instead of offering a map-like aerial view of hypothetical
traffic-patterns, our new Stage View uses three-dimensional models of actual
theatre spaces.
[3] Models are populated by
abstract, three-dimensional avatars representing five classes of beings:
adults, children, babies, large animals, and small animals, as shown in
Figure 3. Each has a “nose” to indicate the direction in which it is
facing. The avatars are distinguished from one another by colours keyed to
names in the Character Panel, and their user-defined movements are
optionally visualized in colour-coded “paths” showing each character's
progress and stopping-points [
Ruecker, Grotkowski, et al. 2013]. Speeches also
appear in the Stage View, in colour-coded bubbles, visually associating
characters' bodies and voices. Alterations to the Stage View are, like
alterations to the Reading View, linked to the Line of Action.
An additional advantage of the new model is that it permits users to move
through three-dimensional space to view the stage or the audience from a
variety of perspectives, including actors' perspectives, as demonstrated in
Figures 4, 5 and 6. So the system can represent the multiple perspectives of
audience members in different parts of the theatre, a phenomenon that must
be accounted for both in planning and in analyzing theatrical production.
The Stage Map in the upper right corner can be used to define predetermined
viewpoints, for ease of navigation.
Finally, the visual emphasis on any individual element of the interface is
determined by the user, by adjusting the sizes and positions of panes, as
shown in Figure 7.
Next steps: usage cases, usability, and multiple modalities
During the first stage of development of the SET system, we conducted a pilot
usability study with scholars as participants [
Roberts-Smith 2010]
and consulted informally with theatre creators about the system’s potential
applications. In our next phase of development, we are exploring potential
differences in the needs of the three constituencies of users we envision for
the SET system – theatre researchers, theatre students, and theatre creators —
and experimenting with new functions tailored to each group's needs. We are
assessing new functions and design ideas in a full-scale user study with twenty
participants who have advanced expertise in one or more of our three target
fields. Our methodology combines recording participants’ interactions with the
SET interface [
Nielsen 2000] and conducting semi-structured
interviews [
Guha and Saraf 2005] that include questions about the potential
for the tool to be an important resource for participants in future [
Ruecker 2006b]. The findings of our study will be integrated with
our ongoing participatory design process, which includes interactions between
designers, programmers and domain experts who are themselves potential end users
of the system [
Gabriele 2010].
Usage cases and usability
There are four main areas of focus to this new phase of development. For
theatre researchers, we have added an annotation function that permits users
to transparently acknowledge and document their research sources, as
illustrated in Figure 8.
Because our research-oriented usage case makes non-textual performance
records explicit, we have come to think of it as a historiographical
iteration of SET [
Roberts-Smith 2013]. For students of
theatre, by contrast, we are conscious of the need to embed pedagogical
guidance into the design of the system, so that students’ experience as
users is a learning activity in itself. In our first tentative exploration
of a pedagogical iteration of SET, we have analyzed the ways in which our
current design implicitly guides users through the process of answering a
theatre-historical research question [
Roberts-Smith and Harvey 2013], by
first presenting users with an empty environment to which theatre-historical
records must be added before the records can be interpreted in a
visualization like the one shown in Figure 8 above. This step-by-step
process is illustrated in Figures 9, 10, and 11.
We hope to develop our pedagogical usage case into an iteration that can
guide students through a process of theatrical text and performance
analysis, as well as theatre-historical research. We are beginning to
develop our third, creation-oriented usage case by re-imagining our avatars
as sketching tools for theatre directors to use in preparation for
rehearsal. This process is taking the form of an open-ended, iterative
movement back and forth between an analysis of preparatory sketches in
Richard Rose’s rehearsal scripts [
Rose 2011] and the SET
team’s collaborative generation and review of a range of potential
approaches to visualizing the creative functions of Rose’s sketches. We have
come to think of this design methodology as a “research discourse of alterity”
[
Gabriele and Ruecker 2013]; it is typical of our development process to
date. Lastly, the fourth strand of our current exploration of use cases and
usability addresses the more intuitive interface that was indicated as a
priority by participants in our pilot user study. To that end, we have begun
to explore the potential applications of game interface design to our system
[
DeSouza-Coehlo and Roberts-Smith 2012], and we are seeking responses to our
initial re-conceptions of the interface, along with our approaches to
research annotation, pedagogical organization, and creation-oriented avatar
design, in our user study.
Multiple modalities and digital performance editions
In addition to these four main areas of focus, however, we are also exploring
an interesting theoretical question that arose during the first stage of SET
development, namely: can non-textual records of production be visualized as
elements of a technological process, like theatrical texts, or are their
modalities different enough to warrant a different approach to
visualization? It is obvious, for example, that some records – such as a set
design like William Chesney’s in Figure 8 — are intended to directly to lead
to material manifestations that we might think of as literal illustrations
of their contents. Since they are not necessarily used literally, however
(for example, the set actually built for the University of Waterloo
production of
Julius Caesar made a significant
change to the horizon line indicated in the set model), they may arguably
become technological in the process of their application. Other production
records – such as Richard Rose’s pre-rehearsal sketches – are designed to be
technological, since they record the deployment of material production
elements whose spatial and temporal semiotics can be analyzed for theatrical
action [
Rose 2011]. Still other records operate primarily as
production illustrations, as do production photographs that record moments
in a live performance event (though these need to be carefully distinguished
from publicity photographs, which are often artificially set up during
dedicated photo shoots). Lastly, a final category of production records seem
to intend a hybrid of literal, technological, and illustrative/documentary
functions. Our curiosity about this final category of record has led to some
tentative experimentation inside the SET system with the well-known map
appended to the only surviving manuscript copy of the medieval morality
play,
The Castle of Perseverance
[
Castle of Perseverance], shown in Figure 12. It records a set design, which
apparently is not only intended for future literal materialization, but also
describes possible alternative future materializations, as well as seeming
to record how the set was built in a particular past performance. The map’s
stage directions seem similarly intended for future technological
application while simultaneously recording how the play has already been
staged.
Figures 13 and 14 show our early experiments in visualizing the multiple
modalities of this text in the SET system.
These initial, incomplete experiments have opened a new avenue of inquiry for
us, namely: might it be possible to conceive of an entirely new approach to
editing plays as digital performance editions? By performance
edition, we mean a visualization that takes on the
traditional responsibilities of communicating the transmission and
interpretive histories of a text, as well as acknowledging its extant
material witnesses, without sacrificing access to its technological
functions. How might we acknowledge the multiple modalities of our research
sources, their historical development, and their continuing present
technological instability, all in the same virtual space?
Conclusion: scope and ambition
SET's new approach to visualizing theatre allows users to engage with the process
of analyzing a theatrical text for action and materializing action through
embodied movement in time and space. Each tool (text, space, character, and so
on) is concrete and specific, but is also treated as a participant in the
technology of the theatre through its relationships both to other tools and to
the organizing principle governing the deployment of them in an individual work
of theatre. That technology is further represented as active and processual,
generated at all levels by the user through his or her selection and deployment
of the tools of production. Design challenges now centre on integrating the
theoretical premises and visual arguments made by the system with the needs and
interests of users in three primary user-groups — theatre scholars, students,
and creators — working in the live, Western, text-based tradition.
The current version of SET has some flexibility for representing works that fall
outside this tradition. An Aristotelian understanding of theatre as dramatic
action need not be limited to works whose “emphatic production element” —
the element that bears proportionally the highest level of responsibility for
generating theatrical action [
Rose 2009] — is words. We might as
easily have a prop-based tradition or a sound-based tradition as a text-based
tradition of theatre, as long as these elements of production generate embodied
action in space over time. (Samuel Beckett's
Breath
[
Beckett 1974], which has no actors at all, is an example of a
form such a prop- and sound-based tradition might take.) The verbal text in
SET’s Reading View could hypothetically be replaced by a musical score or a
choreographic record or a storyboard. Similarly, users could begin by moving
visualizations of characters around in the Stage View and define a line of
action based on these visual patterns. Since the system will accept any
consistent three-dimensional model of a stage space and/or set, any individual
line of action might also be viewed against two or more venues; any venue or set
model might be viewed against a number of different texts. This flexibility
offers the opportunity to analyze the impact of changes in the deployment of
individual production elements upon our perception of a particular line of
action, the impact of a change in technological application, in Worthen's terms,
of textual and non-textual theatrical elements. SET also offers some freedoms
from the hermetic linearity of Aristotelian theatre. Although its timeline
provides a linear perspective, users can also move forwards and backwards in
time, focus on individual moments or individual characters, visualize
choreographic traffic-patterns over time, and access multiple audience and
performer viewpoints, rather than being limited to the single, time-bound
viewpoint of the live spectator.
Among the limitations we acknowledge in the current design of the system, is the
fact that it does not represent works of theatre that take non-Aristotelian
forms. Our singular Line of Action, for example, may not be adequate to
represent the multiple, simultaneous actions in a medieval mystery cycle, or the
cyclical action in a work like Beckett’s Play [
Beckett 1970].
Additionally, since the system takes virtual, three-dimensional space as an
analogy for material space, it cannot account for performances that originate in
virtual environments, nor can it accommodate multi-media performance elements
such as video projections in its virtual sets. Furthermore, since those sets are
treated as hermetic fictional worlds, the system is only relevant to works that
do not participate in the “post-dramatic”
[
Lehmann 2006] interest in interactive performance environments,
whether live, as in the work of such such artists as
Improv
Everywhere
[
Improv Everywhere]; mediated, as in Stern and Mateas’ “one-act
interactive drama”,
Façade
[
Stern and Mateas 2005]; or in the hybrid forms of such theatrical marketing
games as 42 Entertainment’s
I Love Bees
[
42 Entertainment 2004] or
Year Zero
[
42 Entertainment 2007]. Consequently, in addition to our short-term
interests in developing usage cases, enhancing the system’s usability, and
exploring the possibility of a digital performance edition, a longer-term
ambition of the SET research team is to consider how – or even whether –
constructions of theatricality in non-Aristotelian forms might be visualized in
digital media.
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada. Thanks also to our anonymous reviewers for their
extremely helpful suggestions; to Peter S. Donaldson for directing our attention
to some other digital systems for visualizing theatre; to Cassandra Silver for
introducing us to 42 Entertainment; and to participants in the Implementing New
Knowledge Environments 2009 Birds of a Feather Conference for their comments on
an earlier draft of this paper.
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