C of C Theatre Professor Staging "Virtual Vaudeville"

January 23, 2002

Professor Susan Kattwinkel

Vaudeville, America’s popular mainstream entertainment before motion pictures, radio and television, will take a high-tech curtain call. Susan Kattwinkel, a theatre professor at the College of Charleston, is involved in a computer modeling production called “Virtual Vaudeville.” Officially known as “A Live Performance Simulation System: Virtual Vaudeville,” the project has been awarded a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Kattwinkel is part of a team of theatre historians, musicologists, computer scientists, and animators from seven universities that plans, in 2004, to stage a first-of-its-kind internet vaudeville show.

“New computer technology does need to be invented for this,” said Kattwinkel. “The idea of putting performance modeling together with a virtual reality environment is new in the way that we want to do it.”

Performance modeling involves putting sensors on a person’s body and then digitizing all of the movements so that computer models can be constructed. The technology is now used in athletics to study, for example, a golfer or baseball player’s swing.

In the case of the vaudeville project, movement models will be made during performances to be staged at the University of Georgia’s Interactive Performance Lab. Kattwinkel will help ensure that the dialogue, costumes, staging, audience members, and all other elements of the production are historically accurate. Once the show is transformed to the internet, the curtain will be raised on an innovative new research, teaching, and learning tool. A viewer will be able to click on an audience member and watch the vaudeville acts from that person’s seat. He or she will also be able to react to the show and be able to talk with fellow audience members. Hypertext information options will allow viewers to pull up old vaudeville scripts, photographs of the actual performers, programs, and other memorabilia and details.

“It will look like a really good computer game,” said David Saltz, a University of Georgia drama professor and “Virtual Vaudeville’s” principal investigator. Quoted in an onlineathens.com article, Saltz added, “It’s basically using computer game technology for an artistic and scholarly purpose.”

Kattwinkel says that she and other performing arts scholars selected vaudeville as the pilot project’s performance choice during a workshop on computing in the humanities held in 2000.

“The idea is that technology could be used to model all sorts of theatre,” she said. “We can model ancient Greek theatre and study it that way. So this is really a prototype. We would hope this will work well enough and be interesting enough that other funding will become available to explore other performing art forms in this way.”

From the 1850s through the 1930s, vaudeville was, according to Kattwinkel, “the television of its day.” Vaudeville troupes were traveling variety shows featuring singers, dancers, magicians, comics, animal acts, strong men, and freak acts. She says the “Virtual Vaudeville” show will feature four acts, of eight to ten minutes each.

A native of Charlottesville, Va., Kattwinkel says as she began to study theatre history she became most interested in “theatre that the masses saw rather than theatre that only the elite saw. So I also study circuses, magicians...theatre that people see.”

Kattwinkel is excited about being involved in a project that will use 21st century technology to bring new understanding and appreciation to old-time entertainment.

“On the historical end, we hope it to be both a teaching and learning tool where people can pull it up and see what it would have been like to be at a vaudeville show,” she said. “But it’s also good from a research point of view because vaudeville scholars and researchers can go into the environment and argue about it, whether some element of the modeling is accurate or not. So it’s a physical way of studying the form and debating the form rather than just in words which is all we can do now. Plus, with the gaming technology and the interactive features, this vaudeville site will be fun and entertaining, as well as educational.”

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Contact: Patrick Harwood
College Relations
(843) 953-2548
harwoodp@cofc.edu