Abstract
This article concerns a Practice-as-Research process to develop a production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I am the director of the project, which involves collaboration between the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing; Movement Visualisation for e-Cultures (both University of Surrey); Lightwork (multimedia theatre company); and Mesmer (video design and production company). Shakespeare’s play deals with observation and control, confinement and release. These motifs are explored in our project in a multimedia production that examines the relationship between Shakespearean drama and contemporary realisations of surveillance and space. The article addresses two phases of development. The first concerns a workshop production of the play at the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival, Poland. The second concerns a workshop at the University of Surrey exploring explore three motion capture technologies: the Kinect (used for domestic interactive games through the TV), the IP 360-degree surveillance camera (made by the security firm Oncam Global) and three-dimensional surround-camera animation. Lastly, the article reflects on ‘Practice as Research’ as a means of combining scholarly enquiry and the development of contemporary theatre production.