The Canon project

investigates stage design and sets as a new area in the documentation of technical theatre. This is a rather specific and complex area that includes both “stock” sets, reused for multiple performances in different combinations and owned by the theatre building, and set designs that are made for a specific play, by a specific company in a specific time frame. We start from following questions:

• What are the possible ways of documenting design and designers?
• How can we represent the designs and their results in a online data-driven platform?
• How can designers prepare the safeguarding of their heritage?
• How can we help collection owners who have limited expertise in the field to document what they have?

Canon experiments with:

• digitalization and safeguarding of design heritage
• safeguarding formats that are hard to read without specific software or hardware like 3D drawings, control system data files and virtual lighting visualisations.
• Documenting the stage setting in relation to the designer, the play, the lighting concept, staging and vision of the director.
• 3D scanning of models
• Virtual reconstruction of sets
• Capturing intangible information
• documenting the technical background (stage plots, lists etc.) of a production.
• describing the methodology, the process, independent of a production.
• describing the art works of the designer, based on the oeuvre.

Canon

• documents 4 set designers and/or set collections of diverse types to serve as case studies and made available in a sustainable open digital format.
• builds expertise about the different approaches and documenting strategies, including different ways to deal with physical objects, file formats and information.
• develops an ontology leading to an improved and agreed data structure.
• creates guidelines on how to document lighting design.