What can the digital humanities bring to the study of the performing arts? In what way can the methodologies linked to the development of digital technology help us to update or deepen our knowledge of this artistic field? Digital technology enables a range of different methods of analysis for the performing arts. We can identify three distinct approaches: notation, annotation and denotation. The notation of a piece makes it possible to provide a ‘score’ that can, if required, be interpreted using other technologies without affecting the initial artistic intentions; annotation makes it possible to comment on and refine the information gathered from different documents; and denotation allows us to identify crucial information in a sea of documents and to move away from close reading. Finding ways to combine notation, annotation and denotation could help one to get as close as possible to the complex nature of these works and the creative process behind them. Rekall, described in this paper, is an environment that makes it possible to combine these different modes within a single interface. It allows us to combine close reading with distant reading, manual annotation with data visualization and the notation of artistic scores with automatic metadata extraction techniques.