NFDI4Culture Community Performing Arts

The performing arts community encompasses not only the academic disciplines of theatre and dance studies – represented by the Society for Theatre Studies (gtw) and the Society for Dance Research (gtf) – but also a wide range of GLAM institutions with collections focusing on theatre and dance (theatre museums and dance archives), as well as the producing organisations, that is, the theatres themselves.

Huldigung der Wissenschaften und Künste, Bildauschnitt

Performing arts events are mostly based on temporary processes and events involving a live audience, although there is a wide variety of hybrid formats and the digital representation (e.g. streaming) of performances is becoming increasingly important. Organising research data in this field therefore requires specialised concepts and databases, for example to link different sources, objects and media types – ranging from theatre buildings to images and texts of all kinds, stage models and costumes, right through to audiovisual media.

Research into the performing arts is necessarily inter- and transdisciplinary, not only in terms of genres, forms and disciplines (spoken theatre, musical theatre, dance, performance art, puppetry, etc.), but also due to the respective methodological perspectives (practice, historiography, theory). The community’s needs with regard to research data are correspondingly diverse. Linking and reusing this data is relevant not only for research itself but also for artistic practice and the audience, as well as for the institutions that produce and collect such material. The portal www.performing-arts.eu, run by the Specialist Information Service for the Performing Arts (FID DK), already provides a platform for the digital consolidation of heterogeneous data from such collections. Further challenges arise in the areas of digitisation, cataloguing, access provision and long-term archiving, which affect the entire data lifecycle: the modelling of event-related data concepts and standardised data (e.g. for works, productions and performances), the integration of controlled vocabularies, and rights management to ensure the sustainable organisation and publication of research data.