Staging the Medieval Religious Play in Virtual Reality

Late Medieval Germany has seen the emergence of the so-called religious play as the predominant ‘dramatic’ form in an institutional context, while the theatre tradition of Greek and Latin Antiquity had been discontinued. Contents of these plays were mostly taken from the New and Old Testament (incl. Apocrypha) as well as hagiography. However, settings and themes from the secular sphere were often included as social satire and for comic relief. Performed during Christian Holidays, and often intertwined with liturgy and church parades, their venues and ‘stages’ were either set in(side) sacral spaces (churches or other religious buildings) or within close proximity: like central markets or town squares. Religious plays are often believed to have been performed over the course of several days, employing multiple setting (‘Simultanbühne’), that allowed for a non-chronological as well as a perpetual acting and a non-stationary, oscillating focus of the audience. The plays have survived in manuscripts, scrolls, and sketches – sometimes containing a large amount of text for one specific Holiday or several Holidays (Easter & Corpus Christi, Passion), other times only containing text for specific roles or parts. They are often heavily edited by various scribal hands and survived in poor condition due to them being used over long periods of time.

Both the older and the more current scholarly editions of these religious plays often do not take their unique character into account when it comes to performance and setting. Instead, as a result of anachronistic projections the antique theatre or more modern forms of drama (like the Shakespearean stage) are evoked by the mode of representation of the edited texts which has lead to inadequate, misinformed, or flawed interpretations of single plays and an overall misconception of medieval dramatic forms.

Against this, I propose to take full advantage of current technological possibilities such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and 3D-modelling to create a probabilistic model of the medieval multi-sensory, multi-setting ‘stage’ that allows to test common assumptions and new hypotheses about setting, artistic performance, mise-en-scène, audience-performer-interaction and participation in religious plays.

My corpus will consist mainly of Middle High and Early New High German Easter and Passion plays from late C14th to C16th, most of which are accessible in (printed) scholarly editions. I will extract staging information from the plays’ paratexts as well as relevant contexts, especially of those plays where church buildings or staging spaces (for which they were conceptualized and in which they were performed) are known or can be inferred from historical sources; in single cases these historical buildings or urban open spaces are still ‘intact’. This material will be the starting point from which I can create a probabilistic model – an analogy – of the performance space using 3D-modelling (Allen et al. 2016). Further, I will make use of a VR engine (UNREAL Engine), following a set of pre-preparations, to re-enact single scenes or entire plays.