Exploring the potential of combining performance and digital research in a heritage context.

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This is a collaborative impact project between Historic Royal Palaces, Brunel University, and Edinburgh University. It builds on the practice-as-research methodology developed by the PI (Professor Thomas Betteridge) and the CI (Professor Greg Walker), and Dr Wendy Hitchmough's research leadership role within HRP which is an international centre of excellence for innovative heritage research. Dr Hitchmough will also be a CI on the project. The aim of the project is to build on and showcase the site-specific performance as research methodology of earlier AHRC-funded research projects and to use the Banqueting House to explore ways of combining digital technologies, in particular augmented reality, virtual reality and CGI, with performance as a method for conducting research in challenging heritage environments. As part of the Henrician Court Drama and Staging the Henrician Court projects, theatre workshops and plays were performed in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. This was practically possible because the dramas that these projects examined (court plays by John Heywood and John Skelton) required limited scenery. This project addresses a much more ambitious form of theatre, the Stuart masques created by the likes of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones which were often performed in the Banqueting House. It will create the networks and relationships, intellectual, conceptual and institutional, for the development of a technology-led solution to the practical problems of performing plays in a fragile heritage space of national and international cultural significance.The masques that Inigo Jones and others staged in the Banqueting House were spectacular, but the building's heritage status, and in particular its ceiling (which is the only surviving in-situ work by Sir Peter Paul Rubens), make it impossible to stage a historically accurate performance of a Jacobean or Stuart masque there using conventional sets and materials. The Banqueting House is a Grade I Listed Building and the preventive conservation measures that are integral to its management preclude the installation of, for example, Inigo Jones's ephemeral but none the less substantial theatrical sets. There is also archival evidence that torches and other special effects were an important part of Stuart masque performances and it would be impossible to restage these in the Banqueting House. Indeed it appears that the need for these kind of special effects is a possible reason why, after the Rubens' painting was installed in 1637, masques were no longer performed in the Banqueting House. The problems of performing in the Banqueting House are particularly frustrating given the relatively detailed records that exist in relation to, for example, Jones' designs, the survival of the performing space in very close to its original state, and the existence of full texts of many of the dramas. This project will combine an innovative performance experiment in the Banqueting House, facilitating two networking events that bring together academics, digital innovators and performers, and a detailed proposal to develop a digitally-based solution to the problems of using performance as research to specifically explore the production of court masques in the Banqueting House and more generally in fragile or highly protected heritage sites. In the process it will represent an innovative development of the performance-as-research methodologies deployed and developed as part of earlier AHRC-funded projects by the research team.