Musical Dramaturgy Online: Using Digital Archiving for Musical Theatre Research
The assumed transience of dramatic-musical works may be more linked to a bookish 'culture than to materiality of musical theater itself.
To address this issue, is under development at Drama Lab at the University of Brasilia an alternative proposal that brings creative and archiving processes together. It is based on providing online editions of works of Musical Theatre. An online interface organizes all the materials and actions using a database with hypertext files: scores, texts and sounds are available for all members of the creative process.
With the growing demand for works that integrate music and theater, songwriters, producers, and the public require new forms of communication, interaction and exchange of textual, audio and visual materials. The usual history of dramatic-musical works in printed form no longer gives account of all the needs of multi-tasking processes that require efficiency, speed and deal with multiple users.
The online database has at least two applications: it gathers materials and data from an ongoing production or it is a tool for assembling the materials from any staged event already held.
In this paper we present the prototype of this online interface that was used in a case study: the musical "David", premiered in the University of Brasilia, Brazil. The sequence of the scenes from this work is the axis to present the other materials: the book, sheet music, playbacks for rehearsals, presentation video, photos and comments from members of the production.