STAGE, spanning from January 2024 to December 2028, delves into a pivotal moment of transformation: the transition of traditional sources into digital traces. This paradigm shift alters the nature of historical sources, operating on both hermeneutic and epistemological levels. Digital technology transforms traces into data, inviting us to reconsider traditional research approaches in performing arts studies. To build these methods and demonstrate their potential, we will rely first on a corpus that has not yet been explored at this scale and which offers a particularly fertile field to approach such questions: the archives of the Avignon Festival, before opening to broader corpora in a second phase in order to scale up our results and expand our analysis. Bridging qualitative and quantitative research approaches, STAGE focuses on three intermediate objectives:

1) To visualize performing arts, by creating a network using data from programs to showcase interactions among thousands of individuals, different forms of artistic and technical collaborations as well as the context of creation over time. This approach, drawing on actor-network theory, will lead to an updated perspective of the rich and complex context of contemporary European stagings. However, a crucial challenge lies in the absence of a universal standard for describing performing arts. STAGE plans to address this by creating an ontology to enhance description and facilitate interoperability with other collections and datasets.

2) To reveal staging intertextuality. Photographs and videos are crucial traces in performing arts, enabling “distant viewing”. By applying intertextuality to stage imagery, we unveil complex relationships with past performances, identifying resurgences and connections. Advances in computer vision facilitate the development of an iconology of performing arts, tracing aesthetic networks. STAGE will contribute to the training and development of computer-vision algorithms dedicated to performing arts.

3) To model creative processes, taking into account not only the rehearsals but also all the data produced by all the team members. The computational analysis of performances’ creative process, particularly their collaborative dimension, presents significant challenges in performing arts studies. Digital traces, often ignored in actual research on creative processes, offer new opportunities by capturing the entire creation process, from initial ideas to premiere. By developing a multimodal environment to collect and analyze data from 15 performances, STAGE will renew the study of creative processes. This approach will unveil unique insights into the diversity of performing artspractices.