The Evolving Resource of Visualisation in Theatre and Performance Research

This paper explores a number of visualisation tools at use in the theatre and performance field, including AusStage, IbsenStage, my own visualisation project, Ortelia, and several other tools. More specifically, it outlines the research potential that can emerge from using such tools to augment how we document, analyse, recover, and discuss performance. Digital tools and techniques have become invaluable in my own research on spatiality and location, reformulating research possibilities for me as they facilitate a better understanding of performance, theatrical activity, engagement, collaboration, and the movement of people and productions from one location to another, thus assisting to reinforce the spatial significance to theatre.

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Bio:

Joanne Tompkins is Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland. She is the co-author of Post-Colonial Drama (with Helen Gilbert); Women’s Intercultural Performance (with Julie Holledge); and A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (with Holledge, Jonathan Bollen and Frode Helland); and author of Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre (2006) and Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space (2014). She is co-editor, with Anna Birch, of Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice (2012), and has co-edited special issues of Contemporary Theatre Review on site-specificity (with Birch) and on the politics and practices of editing (with Maria Delgado). She is editor of Theatre Journal. She has been involved with the database resource, AusStage, since its inception, and she has produced an interdisciplinary, innovative research tool called Ortelia to enable the analysis of theatre and gallery spaces through computer-based heritage visualisation.