Digital dramaturgies

The scientific challenges that we will tackle are threefold: (I) direct and perform with digital tools, where we will study dramaturgies that creatively use sets, actors and props; (II) direct and play in virtual worlds, where we will examine how the principles of dramaturgy can be applied to virtual reality; and (III) creative writing for the performing arts, where we will design computer languages to plan and track the interactions between human and virtual actors.

To support these three research directions, an important activity of our group will be to provide tools for documenting "in the wild" performances using digital capture, indexing and scoring techniques. In reference to the methodology presented in (Gandhi 2014), (Ronfard 2015) and (Valero 2018), we will record performances with a reduced number of ultra high definition cameras allowing to automatically zoom on all the actors. This research task alternates between the development of new algorithms to analyze the speech, the movements and the gestures of the performers; the implementation of tools for editing web documentaries and interactive films using these algorithms; and real experiences capturing and indexing stage live performances using these tools.