Representing Rehearsal

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Representing Rehearsal

Representing Rehearsal: using interactive video to facilitate & document contemporary collaborative music and theatre practices

This project is a collaboration between the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and the Departments of Music and of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media at the University of York. It is being led by Dr Tom Cornford, Dr Jonathan Hook and Dr Catherine Laws, and is currently supported by York’s Research Priming Fund and the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis.

The research aims to scope new possibilities for interactive video technology that can facilitate and aid the exploration and documentation of collaborative, creative rehearsal practices. It began by assessing the potential for interactive video to support particular needs of rehearsal in devised theatre and music and is now focusing on generating representations of rehearsal data in forms that can be annotated and edited by practitioners in order:

a) to facilitate the development of works for performance,

b) to document processes of devising, and

c) to generate new forms of scripts or scores for future performances.

The research is being undertaken in collaboration with York-based theatre makers Common Ground and music ensemble The Assembled.

The project is being documented at Representing Rehearsal and will have a dedicated symposium at York in July to share its initial findings with practitioners and researchers and to facilitate the discussion of further possibilities for research.

The current phase of the project will conclude with the creation of a mobile application that allows video data to be captured in a lightweight and unobtrusive manner during rehearsals and an interactive approach for visualizing this data, which enables production teams and artists to facilitate, interpret and/or document rehearsals in new and enhanced ways.

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