Reviewed by:

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

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...

 审阅者：

• 
  可视化失落的剧院：虚拟实践和表演空间的恢复作者：Joanne Tompkins
•  莎拉·贝·程

在过去的二十年里，随着学者们采用印刷文本之外的研究、分析和出版模式，与数字人文相关的实践在戏剧和表演研究中变得更加普遍。甚至在数字工具广泛应用之前，戏剧历史学家就利用通信技术——摄影、广播、电影、视频——来捕捉、分析、重播和传达过去的表演。每一项技术进步都为表演的多感官体验增添了新的维度，包括以越来越多的细节和范围捕捉声音和动作。纽约公共图书馆的电影和磁带档案馆、VHS 上流通的戏剧纪录片等资源，或者为戏剧历史课程非法复制和重新复制的各种盗版资源，添加到正式和非正式的戏剧历史记录网络中。随着数字录音、互联网和虚拟环境的出现，文献和学术成果得到了更广泛的传播。

然而，即使戏剧录音在整个二十世纪激增，围绕它们的讨论主要集中在它们对原始表演的缺乏忠诚度上。 2000 年代初期，随着学术叙述开始关注表演录音和重演在历史戏剧叙述中作为证据的作用，这种重点开始发生变化。从戴安娜·泰勒 (Diana Taylor) 的《档案与曲目：美洲文化记忆的表演》(The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas)（2003 年）到托尼·桑特 (Toni Sant) 的《记录表演：数字策展和归档的背景与流程》(Docinging Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving)（2017 年）等书籍探讨了数字技术如何创建不同类型的表演记录。过去十年发生了最重大的转变，戏剧学者利用数字人文学科在数字项目中创造了印刷书籍之外的资源，例如詹妮弗·罗伯茨-史密斯的戏剧模拟环境 (SET) 和法国喜剧登记项目 (CFRP) ）等。米格尔·埃斯科瓦尔·巴雷拉 (Miguel Escobar Varela) 于 2021 年出版的《戏剧作为数据：戏剧研究的计算之旅》提供了精彩的概述，并详细解释了这一新兴领域的最佳实践。巴雷拉借鉴自己和其他人的工作，记录了研究人员如何将数字方法和技术整合到戏剧表演的研究中。

合着的《可视化失落的剧院》一书将这些项目和出版物作为一个令人信服的例子，说明这些方法如何通过详细的案例研究，将理论探究应用于具体项目，增进我们对戏剧过去的理解。该书源于作者各自的合作研究领域，并结合 VR 环境 Ortelia 的开发，展示了历史学家和观众如何以数字方式重建并重新体验戏剧空间，例如英国的玫瑰剧院和其他文化遗产。该书的三位合著者——朱莉·霍利奇、乔纳森·博伦和乔安妮·汤普金斯——此前曾与弗罗德·海兰合作过数字人文项目，包括《全球玩偶之家：易卜生》和《遥远的愿景》（2016）。 Tompkins 领导虚拟环境 Ortelia 的开发已有十多年了（参见 Tompkins 和 Delbridge，电子可视化和艺术，2009 年），包括针对一系列画廊和文化环境的开发。

《可视化失落的剧院》详细介绍了虚拟现实 (VR) 重建的理论和实践方法，即历史剧院空间的重演和推测性重新想象。作者详细介绍了特定剧院的虚拟环境如何不仅有助于对过去有更深入、更细致的了解[完第 115 页]，而且还可以通过动作捕捉和在虚拟环境中工作的“演员研究员”的参与来培养新的表演。楷模。过去的经历及其富有想象力的再现为舞台上的行为和观众可能的反应提供了历史洞察。这本书的多模态学术呼应了表演的活力，为历史学家及其读者提供了历史模型和背景下的新视角。

《可视化失落的剧院》的结构简单直观，首先对其中详细的思想、历史和实践进行了清晰而引人注目的介绍，然后是案例研究和简短的结论。这五起案件...