From Stage to Data: Computational Approaches to Performing Arts Archives

This talk presents the ERC Advanced Grant project STAGE (2024–2028), which applies computational methods and semantic web technologies to the archives of the Festival d’Avignon, one of the world's largest and longest-running theatre festivals. Drawing on a corpus of thousands of documents, including programmes, photographs, video recordings and traces of creative processes, STAGE develops tools and ontologies for performing arts analytics. The talk will introduce the Arvest platform for multimodal annotation, the Programme-to-Data AI pipeline for structured data extraction, and the LA-PA ontology, a CIDOC-CRM/Linked Art extension for modelling performance events. A short live demonstration will be included.

Clarisse Bardiot is a Professor of History of Contemporary Theatre and Digital Humanities at Rennes 2 University. Her research focuses on performing arts digital traces, creative processes analysis, the history and aesthetics of digital performance, the preservation of digital works, and experimental publishing. In 2023, she was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for a project entitled From Stage to Data, the Digital Turn of Contemporary Performing Arts Historiography (STAGE). She is the author of Performing Arts and Digital Humanities: From Traces to Data (Wiley / Iste, 2021).