Hidden Dramas: Cartographic Revelations in the World of Theatre Studies

Katherine Dunham's Global Method and the Embodied Politics of Dance's Everyday

“…Transnational mobility is often an abstract concept, but in Figure 1 we use a space-time geography approach to show Dunham's international travel broken down into each of the 1,426 days for which we have location data in the 1950-3 everyday dataset. 24 This visualization represents time as elevation, beginning in 1950 at the base map, and ending with 1953 at the top. From this map, we can see both the geographical reach of Dunham's travels over these four years, encompassing locations in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as how cities are connected sequentially by Dunham's movement through them, including repeated returns to specific locations.…”

Theater as Data

“…Taken together, these two maps show the close link between funding and international exposure. The cartographic displays in Holledge et al where previously presented by Bollen and Holledge (2011) to an audience of cartographers. In that previous article, they argue that theater maps show the "importance of distributional flows through time, across geographical space, and between artists from production to production" (226).…”

“…All the pioneering projects in theater studies mentioned above accounted for time in one way or another. Bollen and Holledge (2011) superimposed networks into their cartographic displays to show the temporal sequence in which performances followed one another. Bench and Elswit (2017) represented tours as point to point lines that can be animated in the online versions of their maps, to show the order in which the tours were carried out.…”