Virtual Vaudeville: A Live Performance Simulation System

Virtual Vaudeville: A Live Performance Simulation
System

David
Saltz

University of Georgia
saltz@arches.uga.edu

2003

University of Georgia

Athens, Georgia

ACH/ALLC 2003

editor

Eric
Rochester

William
A.
Kretzschmar, Jr.

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

THE PROBLEM: REPRESENTING AND ARCHIVING LIVE PERFORMACE
Manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, films, and recordings are artifacts that
can be preserved and archived for subsequent generations to appreciate and
analyze. Live theatre, however, is ephemeral. Is it possible to archive a
live performance? One can use film or videotape to document a present-day
performance, and, with some creative interpretation and speculation, to
recreate a performance from the past. But films and videotapes are incapable
of conveying the experience of attending a live performance. A filmed
performance offers only a single perspective on the action: the camera
decides exactly where to look at each moment. Spectators at a live event, by
contrast, act as their own camera operators, selecting their own point of
focus—which may not even be on stage. Films omits a vital dimension of live
performance: the viewer’s immersion in the world of the theater, and the
crucial role that the community of spectators plays in constituting a
performance event.
The underlying problem here extends beyond the theatrical performance.
Precisely the same challenges arise with any kind of performative event,
such as dance performances, rituals, political congresses, coronations,
parades, festivals, battles, riots, etc.
One strategy to address this problem has been to build a physical
reconstruction of an historic structure and to stage performances in it, as
has been done, for example, with the Globe Theatre in London and with
numerous structures in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. This solution
requires an extraordinary, continuing investment of money and land, and so
is feasible only in a very limited number of cases. Moreover, such physical
reconstructions are available only to people at one geographic location and
implement only one interpretation, and so they cannot be used to evaluate
conflicting scholarly interpretations of the historical evidence. Perhaps
the deepest problem with such historical constructions is that, while
painstaking efforts may be undertaken to achieve historical accuracy in the
physical environment, performers and perhaps even the support personnel, the
audience itself—and so, ultimately, the context of reception—remains
resolutely contemporary.

OUR SOLUTION: THE LIVE PERFORMACE SIMULATION SYSTEM
In January of 2002, I began work as Principle Investigator on a project
designed to address this problem: “A Live Performance Simulation System:
Virtual Vaudeville.” Our strategy is to recreate historical performances in
a virtual reality environment. Virtual Vaudeville is, in effect, a
single-user 3D computer game that allows users to enter a virtual theatre to
watch a simulated performance. The objective is to reproduce a feeling of
“liveness” in this environment: the sensation of being surrounded by human
activity onstage, in the audience and backstage, and the ability to choose
where to look at any given time (onstage or off) and to move within the
environment. A vital concern is to find a way to bring the nuances of great
stage performances into this virtual environment. To this end, we are using
optical motion and facial capture technology to capture real-world
performances by professional, highly skilled actors, singers, dancers,
acrobats and musicians.
This three-year project is supported by a $900,000 grant from the National
Science Foundation, supplemented by an additional $110,000 from the State of
Georgia. I am leading a team of researchers from seven universities,
including the University of Georgia, the University of Pittsburgh, Georgia
Tech and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, that includes historians
specializing in nineteenth century American theatre, music and culture,
computer scientists specializing in high-performance 3D game design, and
theatre practitioners.
Our long-term goal to develop a flexible set of techniques and technologies
that scholars and theatre practitioners can use to simulate a wide range of
performance traditions, from Classical Greece to Japanese Noh. Our
short-term objective is to complete a fully-functional simulation of
nineteenth century American vaudeville theatre.

VAUDEVILLE
American vaudeville an especially apt test case for Live Performance
Simulation. Vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the
United States from the 1880s through the 1920s, functioning in its day much
as television does today. Many vaudeville acts both reflected and helped to
constitute the enthusiasms and anxieties of their time, especially those
concerning the integration of new immigrant groups into mainstream American
culture. Consequently a rich simulation of a vaudeville performance will be
a useful resource, not just for those interested in theatre history, but for
scholars and students of American history generally.
A vaudeville performance was divided into many short, self-contained
segments. A typical vaudeville bill encompassed a wide variety of acts—
contortionist performances, dance numbers, juggling acts, singing groups,
comic monologues, blackface comedy, condenses versions of full-length
plays—with particular acts in the lineup appealing differently to different
groups in the audience. Consequently, simulating different acts of a
vaudeville show and exploring the likely responses of different groups of
spectators opens up for historical investigation a wide range of ethnic,
gender, class, and racialized interactions during America's industrial
age.
Our simulated performance takes place in B.F. Keith’s Union Square Theatre, a
typical Vaudeville house seating approximately 2000 spectators, in the year
1895, fifteen years after the first Vaudeville theatre opened in New York.
We are recreating four of the most popular and representative acts on the
vaudeville circuit during that time: (1) the strongman Sandow the
Magnificant; (2) the Irish singer Maggie Cline; (3) the comic “stage Jew”
Frank Bush; and (4) the sketch comedy of the four Cohans, whose youngest
member, George M. Cohan, went on to become one of the great stars of early
twentieth century Broadway. As we approach the end of our first year of work
on the project, have completed archival research into all of these acts and
are creating the models and motion-capturing the performances. Our
presentation will feature a demonstration of significant portions of the
Sandow act that as of this writing are complete and fully-functional.

DESIGN
Virtual Vaudeville allows the user to switch between two very different ways
of experiencing the simulated performances. In what we call “invisible
camera” mode, viewers fly through the 3D space to observe the performance
from any position in the theatre and zoom in as close to the performers as
they please.
Alternatively, the viewer can adopt an embodied perspective, watching the
performance through the eyes of a particular member of the audience. Virtual
Vaudeville allows the viewer to select one of four spectators, each
representing a different socio-economic group in 19th century America: (1)
Mrs. Dorothy Shopper, a wealthy socialite attending the performance with her
young daughter; (2) Mr. Luigi Calzilaio, an Italian immigrant fresh off the
boat, attending the performance with his more Americanized brother; (3) Mr.
Jake Spender, a young “sport” sitting next to a Chorus Girl (with him he may
or may not strike up a relationship, depending on the viewer’s choices); and
(4) Miss Lucy Teacher, an African American schoolteacher watching the
performance with her boyfriend from the second balcony, where she is
confined by the theatre’s segregation policy.
Viewers can switch between any of the avatars at any time, and can move the
avatar’s head to focus on different areas of the stage or auditorium, and
can trigger a limited set of avatar responses, for example applauding or
laughing. Some of these responses are verbal, such as cracking a joke or
heckling the performance. In these cases, the viewer selects only the
generic response type, and the system produces a specific response
appropriate what is happening onstage and off, taking into account the
viewer’s previous interactions with other members of the virtual audience.
Because the surrounding spectators respond interactively to the viewer's
avatar, each viewer has a different experience of the performance event.

SIGNIFICANCE
Virtual Vaudeville offers scholars in all disciplines in the humanities a
model for a new kind of “critical edition.” A conventional published
monograph can pick and choose details to examine, and so lacuna and even
contradictions in the historical analysis are easy to overlook. The
imperative of precisely recreating both on-stage and off-stage events will
demand an unprecedented degree of scholarly thoroughness and rigor.

Key to our project is the depth of the collaboration between technology,
scholarship, pedagogy and art. This project is conceived to make a
significant contribution to all four domains simultaneously, rather than
merely using any one in the service of the others. The end result, we, hope,
will represent an important advance in the design and implementation of
virtual environments, building on recent successes in creating
photo-realistic simulations of real 3D environments by introducing a large
quantity of complex human performance data. It will constitute an invaluable
work of applied scholarship, an unprecedented resource for visualizing past
performances and testing hypotheses about historical performance practices.
It will provide an unprecedented resource for students to engage with
historical performance traditions as performance (and not as literature or
film). Finally, from an artistic perspective, the Virtual Vaudeville project
will test the potential of virtual reality technology to provide truly
nuanced and engaging theater experiences.