Scenographics
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My research on ‘scenographics’ first emerged as part of my monograph, Beyond Scenography. This project investigated the Anglophone appropriation of the term ‘scenography’ and how this now relates to the expanded practices of theatre and performance. The book argued for a critical distinction between ‘scenography’ and ‘scenographic’: where a scenographic perspective can operate beyond the institutional and ideological contexts of theatre. Case studies include scenographic architecture, installation art, protest art, and parades. Since the book’s publication in 2019, I have sought to apply and expand the concept of scenographics to a variety of contexts such as justice, costume, sports wear, and gender.
Publications
How is a feeling of world produced through staged material cultures? This question provides the through-line to my argument for this article. In an era of climate crisis, acts of representation that enact, invite or irritate conceptual models for ‘world feelings’ are increasingly urgent.
What do costumes do? I ask this question with two positions in mind. First, I am interested in how costumes produce a sense of atmosphere, occasion, or event. Second, I propose that costuming as a socio-material technology orientates feelings of world.
The concept of gender-assemblage is proposed as a critical framework to identify, critique and negotiate the more-than-human processes of gendering. Sin’s drag draws upon their non-binary identity to speculate renewed discourses, actions and expectations for gendered practices.
Taking the UK Grime artist Stormzy’s performance at Glastonbury 2019 as a case study, this article investigates the tactics, technologies and processes revealed through the act of staging atmospheres.
Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings could be seen to represent stage environments. But at the same time, one could argue that, as with the stage environments they evoke, her paintings enact a feeling of place that others, complicates, and reveals normative orders of place. This is my starting point for proposing “painting scenographics.”
Reflecting on writing Beyond Scenography, this essay in English and Portuguese documents the lecture ‘Scenographic Futures’, presented as part of the session PQ TALKS, at PQ 2019, a position statements called ‘Changing the Question’is presented to reflect if rather than asking what is scenography, now the question is what does scenography do?. How scenography affects, channels, and orientate experiences of stage, place, and world.
For the Design Studio for Social Intervention, I consider ‘justice scenographics’ to offer a model for speculating renewed human-world relations based on a climate ceiling model of economics.
Beyond Scenography offers a manifesto for a renewed theory of scenographic practice for the student and professional theatrical designer. With sections on installation art and gardening as well as marketing and placemaking, this book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events.
Videos
Trans/nonbinary Scenographics w/ Rachel Hann, Nic Farr, M'ck McKeague
This episode is based on a talk I gave for Innovative Costume of the 21st Century in Moscow, June 2019. It explores the idea of body assemblages as related to costume practices and design. It ends with a manifesto (detailed below) with the episode structured in five parts:
As prep for PQ2019, this latest episode on 'Scenographic Futures' insiders 9 key concepts, themes and practices that will drive scenography's future.
This episode outlines one of the conclusions of Beyond Scenography. 'Scenographics' are approached as the place orientating traits of stage material cultures, inclusive of theatre and dance, as well as gardening, installation art, interior design, visual merchandising etc.
Episode II of the Beyond Scenography series looks at the possible distinctions between notions of 'the scenic' and that of 'scenes'. This debate considers how landscape is appreciated through the aesthetic politics of the picturesque and what this tells us about the potentiality of scenes as 'things that happen'.
In this episode entitled 'Beyond empty stages', I outline what a scenographic approach reveals about the notion of an ‘empty space’ and how stages become manifest.