Performance and Design – serie

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023Sound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre’s auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience’s internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre’s auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology.This is a study about drama, entertainment, modernity and the theatre of audibility. It addresses the cultural frames of resonance that inform our understanding of SOUND as the rubric of the world we experience through our ears. Ross Brown reveals how mythologies, pop-culture, art, commerce and audio, have shaped the audible world as a form of theatre. Garrick, De Loutherbourg, Brecht, Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, James Bond, Scooby-Do and Edison make cameo appearances as Brown weaves together a history of modern hearing, with an argument that sound is a story, audibility has a dramaturgy, hearing is scenographic, and the auditoria of drama serve modern life as the organon, or definitive frame of reference, on the sonic world.

Contemporary Scenography investigates scenographic concepts, practices and aesthetics in Germany from1989 to the present. Facing the end of the political divide, the advent of the digital age and the challenges of globalization, German-based designers and scenographers have reacted in a variety of ways to these shifts in the cultural landscape.The edited volume, a compilation of 12 original chapters written in collaboration with acclaimed scenographers,stage designers and distinguished scholars, offers fresh insights and in-depth analyses of current artistic concepts, discourse and innovation in this multifaceted, dynamic field. The book covers a broad spectrum of scenography, including theatre works by Katrin Brack, Bert Neumann, Aleksandar Denic, Klaus Grünberg, Vinge/Müller and Rimini Protokoll, in addition to scenography in museums, exhibitions, social spaces and in various urban contexts.Presenting a range of perspectives, the volume explores the interdisciplinarity of contemporary scenography and its ongoing diversification, raising questions relating to cultural heritage, genre and media specificity, knowledge transfer, local versus global practices, internationalization and cultural exchange. Combined with a set of stimulating examples of scenographic design in action – presented through interviews, artists’ statements and case studies – the contributors develop a theoretical framework for understanding scenography as an art practice and discourse.

The Model as Performance investigates the history and development of the scale model from the Renaissance to the present from a scenographic perspective and a performative paradigm that explores what the model can do and how it is used in theatre and architecture. It provides a comprehensive historical context and theoretical framework for theatre scholars, scenographers, artists and architects interested in the model’s reality-producing capacity and its recent emergence in contemporary art practice and exhibition. For the undergraduate student, it provides a historical survey of the model, and to the postgraduate student, it opens up a new methodological approach. Introducing a typology of the scale model beyond the iterative and the representative model, the authors identify the autonomous model as a provocative construction between past and present, idea and reality that challenges and redefines the relationship between object, viewer and environment. Case studies include Brunelleschi’s dome models and Bel Geddes’ Futurama, Mies van der Rohe’s mock ups and Zumthor’s atmospheric models, Anna Viebrock’s life size boxes and Herzog & de Meuron’s miniature styrofoam exhibits.The Model as Performance was shortlisted for the best Performance Design & Scenography Publication Award at the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) 2019.

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk’s Theatrical Worlds is a detailed account of the company's award-winning productions and their historical context. Examining Punchdrunk's role as pioneers of immersive theatre in the UK through a range of their productions including Sleep No More and The Drowned Man besides theatrical works such as Faust, The Duchess of Malfi and Kabeiroi, and cross-platform productions like The Moon Slave, The Borough and The Oracles, the book presents an original framework for understanding immersion in theatrical and mixed reality experiences.Central to the book is a study of how immersive experience is produced in interaction with physical and digital scenography for participatory audiences. Through ethnographies of the company, their designers, actors, producers and audiences, the book interrogates the relationship between the aesthetics of interaction and the experience of immersion in Punchdrunk’s work. The theoretical framework that the book introduces affords analyses of material cultures and the influence of technology on interaction design in theatre and beyond, and offers a blueprint for next-generation immersive design and scenography for interactive multimedia environments.

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk’s Theatrical Worlds is a detailed account of the company's award-winning productions and their historical context. Examining Punchdrunk's role as pioneers of immersive theatre in the UK through a range of their productions including Sleep No More and The Drowned Man besides theatrical works such as Faust, The Duchess of Malfi and Kabeiroi, and cross-platform productions like The Moon Slave, The Borough and The Oracles, the book presents an original framework for understanding immersion in theatrical and mixed reality experiences.Central to the book is a study of how immersive experience is produced in interaction with physical and digital scenography for participatory audiences. Through ethnographies of the company, their designers, actors, producers and audiences, the book interrogates the relationship between the aesthetics of interaction and the experience of immersion in Punchdrunk’s work. The theoretical framework that the book introduces affords analyses of material cultures and the influence of technology on interaction design in theatre and beyond, and offers a blueprint for next-generation immersive design and scenography for interactive multimedia environments.

Shortlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023 In this book practitioner and researcher Louise Ann Wilson examines the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and promotes the development of scenography as a distinctive type of applied art and performance practice that seeks tangible, therapeutic, and transformative real-world outcomes. It is what Christopher Baugh calls ‘scenography with purpose’.Using case studies drawn from the body of site-specific walking-performances she has created in the UK since 2011, Wilson demonstrates how she uses scenography to emplace challenging, marginalizing or ‘missing’ life-events into rural landscapes – creating a site of transformation – in which participants can reflect upon, re-image and re-imagine their relationship to their circumstances. Her work has addressed terminal illness and bereavement, infertility and childlessness by circumstance, and (im)mobility and memory. These works have been created on mountains, in caves, along coastlines and over beaches. Each case-study is supported by evidential material demonstrating the effects and outcomes of the performance being discussed.The book reveals Wilson’s creative methodology, her application of three distinct strands of transdisciplinary research into the site/landscape, the subject/life-event, and with the people/participants affected by it. She explains the 7 ‘scenographic’ principles she has developed, and which apply theories and aesthetics relating to land/scape art and walking and performance practices from Early Romanticism to the present day. They are underpinned by the concept of the feminine ‘material’ sublime, and informed by the attentive, autotopographic, therapeutic and highly scenographic use of walking and landscape found in the work of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries. Case studies include Fissure (2011), Ghost Bird (2012), The Gathering (2014), Warnscale (2015), Mulliontide (2016), Dorothy's Room (2018) and Women's Walks to Remember: ‘With memory I was there’ (2018-2019).

Shortlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023 This book uses digital media theory to explore contemporary understandings of expanded scenography as spatial practice. It surveys and analyses a selection of ground-breaking, experimental digital media performances that comprise a genealogy spanning the last 30 years, in order to show how the arrival of digital technologies have profoundly transformed performance practice. Performances are selected based on their ability to elicit the unique specificities of digital media in new and original ways, thereby exposing both the richness and shortcomings of digital culture.O'Dwyer argues that contemporary scenography is largely propelled by and dependent on digital technologies and represents a rich, fertile domain, where unbridled creativity can explore new techniques and challenge the limits of knowledge. The 30-year genealogy includes works by Troika Ranch, Stelarc, Klaus Obermaier, Chunky Moves, Onion Lab and Blast Theory. In addition to applying a broad scope of performance analysis and aesthetic theory, the work includes artists’ interviews and opinions.The volume opens important aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political themes in order to highlight the impact of digital technologies on scenographic practice and the blossoming of experimental interdisciplinarity. Ultimately, the book is an exploration of how evolutionary leaps in technology contribute to how humans think, act, make work, engage one another, and therefore construct meaning and identity.

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023Consuming Scenography offers an insight into contemporary scenographic practice beyond the theatre. It explores the ways in which scenography is used to create a global cultural impact and accelerate profits in the site-specific context of themed shopping malls. It analyses the effect of the architectural, aesthetic, spatial, material and sensory aspects of design through their performative encounters with consumers in order to offer a better understanding of performance design.In the first part the author explores the spatial seduction of an enclosed market space and traces the origins of scenographic temporality in permanent architectonic spaces for trade and commerce, from ancient Greek and Roman roofed markets and Oriental bazaars to 19th-century arcades and department stores to modern-day shopping malls.The second section addresses the site-specific theatricality of the shopping mall, considering the use of performative aspects of scenography in the creation of corporate identity. It engages with production and consumption of experience in themed shopping malls, using historical, aesthetical, social and political lenses. In the final section, the author intertwines fluidity of market changes with flexibility of scenographic matter, drawing attention to both contradictions and prospects that merging of scenography and architecture can bring along.Considering a variety of case studies of themed shopping malls, including the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai, Terminal 21 in Bangkok, the Villaggio in Doha and Montecasino in Johannesburg, as well as further examples from Europe, USA and Asia – this book provides a wide-ranging critical examination of the ways in which scenographic thinking and practices are exploited in wider cultural contexts for impact, branding, and higher profits.

Contemporary Scenography investigates scenographic concepts, practices and aesthetics in Germany from1989 to the present. Facing the end of the political divide, the advent of the digital age and the challenges of globalization, German-based designers and scenographers have reacted in a variety of ways to these shifts in the cultural landscape.The edited volume, a compilation of 12 original chapters written in collaboration with acclaimed scenographers,stage designers and distinguished scholars, offers fresh insights and in-depth analyses of current artistic concepts, discourse and innovation in this multifaceted, dynamic field. The book covers a broad spectrum of scenography, including theatre works by Katrin Brack, Bert Neumann, Aleksandar Denic, Klaus Grünberg, Vinge/Müller and Rimini Protokoll, in addition to scenography in museums, exhibitions, social spaces and in various urban contexts.Presenting a range of perspectives, the volume explores the interdisciplinarity of contemporary scenography and its ongoing diversification, raising questions relating to cultural heritage, genre and media specificity, knowledge transfer, local versus global practices, internationalization and cultural exchange. Combined with a set of stimulating examples of scenographic design in action – presented through interviews, artists’ statements and case studies – the contributors develop a theoretical framework for understanding scenography as an art practice and discourse.

This is the first major collection of critical responses to performance lighting and includes contributions from award-winning lighting designers, researchers and artists. Showcasing recent examples of work – with case studies of lighting practices in Britain, Europe, the US and China – ­­combined with theoretical and analytical approaches to practice, this will enrich your understanding of the role and potential of light in performance and related creative practices. This volume explores three core themes and provides a framework for thinking through the role of light in performance:1. Experience — considers both the audience's experience of light and the ways in which light influences the experience of performers2. Creativity — examines both the creative, performative capacities of light in performance, as well as the creative practices of lighting designers3. Meaning — offers an expanded view of performance aesthetics by examining the capacity of light to influence and generate meaning within performance.The case studies are drawn from a wide-array of lighting practice, including: Jennifer Tipton on the role of light as a structural language in performance; Jesper Kongshaug on the lighting of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens; Lucy Carter on her work in installation and dance; Psyche Chui on the productive fusion of Western lighting techniques with contemporary Chinese opera; Katharine Williams on the role of light in feminist political theatre made by RashDash; and Paule Constable on storytelling with light in a range of productions, including War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Angels in America.

Shortlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023 This book uses digital media theory to explore contemporary understandings of expanded scenography as spatial practice. It surveys and analyses a selection of ground-breaking, experimental digital media performances that comprise a genealogy spanning the last 30 years, in order to show how the arrival of digital technologies has profoundly transformed performance practice. Performances are selected based on their ability to elicit the unique specificities of digital media in new and original ways, thereby exposing both the richness and shortcomings of digital culture.O'Dwyer argues that contemporary scenography is largely propelled by and dependent on digital technologies and represents a rich, fertile domain, where unbridled creativity can explore new techniques and challenge the limits of knowledge. The 30-year genealogy includes works by Troika Ranch, Stelarc, Klaus Obermaier, Chunky Move, Onion Lab and Blast Theory. In addition to applying a broad scope of performance analysis and aesthetic theory, the work includes artists’ interviews and opinions.The volume opens important aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political themes in order to highlight the impact of digital technologies on scenographic practice and the blossoming of experimental interdisciplinarity. Ultimately, the book is an exploration of how evolutionary leaps in technology contribute to how humans think, act, make work, engage one another, and therefore construct meaning and identity.

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023Sound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre’s auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience’s internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre’s auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology.This is a study about drama, entertainment, modernity and the theatre of audibility. It addresses the cultural frames of resonance that inform our understanding of SOUND as the rubric of the world we experience through our ears. Ross Brown reveals how mythologies, pop-culture, art, commerce and audio, have shaped the audible world as a form of theatre. Garrick, De Loutherbourg, Brecht, Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, James Bond, Scooby-Do and Edison make cameo appearances as Brown weaves together a history of modern hearing, with an argument that sound is a story, audibility has a dramaturgy, hearing is scenographic, and the auditoria of drama serve modern life as the organon, or definitive frame of reference, on the sonic world.

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023Consuming Scenography offers an insight into contemporary scenographic practice beyond the theatre. It explores the ways in which scenography is used to create a global cultural impact and accelerate profits in the site-specific context of themed shopping malls. It analyses the effect of the architectural, aesthetic, spatial, material and sensory aspects of design through their performative encounters with consumers in order to offer a better understanding of performance design.In the first part the author explores the spatial seduction of an enclosed market space and traces the origins of scenographic temporality in permanent architectonic spaces for trade and commerce, from ancient Greek and Roman roofed markets and Oriental bazaars to 19th-century arcades and department stores to modern-day shopping malls.The second section addresses the site-specific theatricality of the shopping mall, considering the use of performative aspects of scenography in the creation of corporate identity. It engages with production and consumption of experience in themed shopping malls, using historical, aesthetical, social and political lenses. In the final section, the author intertwines fluidity of market changes with flexibility of scenographic matter, drawing attention to both contradictions and prospects that merging of scenography and architecture can bring along.Considering a variety of case studies of themed shopping malls, including the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai, Terminal 21 in Bangkok, the Villaggio in Doha and Montecasino in Johannesburg, as well as further examples from Europe, USA and Asia – this book provides a wide-ranging critical examination of the ways in which scenographic thinking and practices are exploited in wider cultural contexts for impact, branding, and higher profits.

Shortlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023 In this book practitioner and researcher Louise Ann Wilson examines the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and promotes the development of scenography as a distinctive type of applied art and performance practice that seeks tangible, therapeutic, and transformative real-world outcomes. It is what Christopher Baugh calls ‘scenography with purpose’.Using case studies drawn from the body of site-specific walking-performances she has created in the UK since 2011, Wilson demonstrates how she uses scenography to emplace challenging, marginalizing or ‘missing’ life-events into rural landscapes – creating a site of transformation – in which participants can reflect upon, re-image and re-imagine their relationship to their circumstances. Her work has addressed terminal illness and bereavement, infertility and childlessness by circumstance, and (im)mobility and memory. These works have been created on mountains, in caves, along coastlines and over beaches. Each case-study is supported by evidential material demonstrating the effects and outcomes of the performance being discussed.The book reveals Wilson’s creative methodology, her application of three distinct strands of transdisciplinary research into the site/landscape, the subject/life-event, and with the people/participants affected by it. She explains the 7 ‘scenographic’ principles she has developed, and which apply theories and aesthetics relating to land/scape art and walking and performance practices from Early Romanticism to the present day. They are underpinned by the concept of the feminine ‘material’ sublime, and informed by the attentive, autotopographic, therapeutic and highly scenographic use of walking and landscape found in the work of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries. Case studies include Fissure (2011), Ghost Bird (2012), The Gathering (2014), Warnscale (2015), Mulliontide (2016), Dorothy's Room (2018) and Women's Walks to Remember: ‘With memory I was there’ (2018-2019).

What is the impact of virtual models and realms in contemporary theatre, art and architecture?This volume explores the evolution of virtual models, their transformative spatial potential, and their capacity for world-making using a range of case studies drawn from global contemporary theatre, art and architecture practice.It draws upon a rich array of contemporary examples, including the Japanese artist collective Dumb Type, Chinese artist Lu Yang, US­-Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari, Björk, and the UK research agency Forensic Architecture. In parallel, a historical overview focused on the formative years of digital society provides context to the rapid development of virtual technologies, including the work of architecture collectives Superstudio and Archigram and seminal art, performance and technology collaborations from 1960s New York onward, enabled by institutions such as MoMA and Bell Labs. Behind this inquiry is a historical and theoretical positioning of the immaterial and its relationship to the material. Discussing emerging forms of expanded reality (XR) as devices in the theoretical and cultural framework of the virtual model, this study reveals the processes made visible in exhibitions, installations and performances while focusing on overlapping spaces, narratives and actors as they contribute to constructing virtual worlds. Virtual Models in Theatre, Art and Architecture: Making Worlds reframes the virtual model as dispositif at the interface of the real, the fictional and the virtual, encouraging the reader to critically consider how new technologies open new spaces for knowledge creation and creative expression.

This pioneering collection illuminates the immersive world of Extended Reality Performance (XRP), where avant-garde digital performance-makers push the boundaries of creativity using cutting-edge extended reality (XR) technologies.In an era dominated by rapid advancements in hardware and software, XR technologies have surged in popularity, allowing everyone with a smartphone, tablet or head-mounted display to partake in digital experiences. This collection serves as a portal to the merger of the physical and the digital, encompassing augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies.It offers a broad selection of practice-based perspectives by leading artists and companies creating and presenting work across Asia, South and North America and Europe. Through their invaluable insights, this book delves into the birth of this revolutionary genre while also offering a fresh perspective, unravelling the creative processes that define XRP. It provides a compilation of artistic position papers, which respond to the need for performance designers to invent imaginative experiences within virtual and mixed reality landscapes. These experiences redefine performer-audience dynamics, centring spatial exploration and discovery.Whether you're a tech enthusiast or an art aficionado, this collection invites you to witness the birth of a new era in performance design.

Shortlisted for the 2019 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeScenography Expanded is a foundational text offering readers a thorough introduction to contemporary performance design, both in and beyond the theatre. It examines the potential of the visual, spatial, technological, material and environmental aspects of performance to shape performative encounters. It analyses examples of scenography as sites of imaginative exchange and transformative experience and it discusses the social, political and ethical dimensions of performance design. The international range of contributors and case studies provide clear perspectives on why scenographic design has become a central consideration for performance makers today.The extended introduction defines the characteristics of 21st-century scenography and examines the scope and potentials of this new field. Across five sections, the volume provides examples and case studies which richly illustrate the scope of contemporary scenographic practice and which analyse the various ways in which it is used in global cultural contexts. These include mainstream theatre practice, experimental theatre, installation and live art, performance in the city, large-scale events and popular entertainments, and performances by and for specific communities.

Shortlisted for the 2019 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeScenography Expanded is a foundational text offering readers a thorough introduction to contemporary performance design, both in and beyond the theatre. It examines the potential of the visual, spatial, technological, material and environmental aspects of performance to shape performative encounters. It analyses examples of scenography as sites of imaginative exchange and transformative experience and it discusses the social, political and ethical dimensions of performance design. The international range of contributors and case studies provide clear perspectives on why scenographic design has become a central consideration for performance makers today.The extended introduction defines the characteristics of 21st-century scenography and examines the scope and potentials of this new field. Across five sections, the volume provides examples and case studies which richly illustrate the scope of contemporary scenographic practice and which analyse the various ways in which it is used in global cultural contexts. These include mainstream theatre practice, experimental theatre, installation and live art, performance in the city, large-scale events and popular entertainments, and performances by and for specific communities.

The Model as Performance investigates the history and development of the scale model from the Renaissance to the present. Employing a scenographic perspective and a performative paradigm, it explores what the model can do and how it is used in theatre and architecture. The volume provides a comprehensive historical context and theoretical framework for theatre scholars, scenographers, artists and architects interested in the model’s reality-producing capacity and its recent emergence in contemporary art practice and exhibition.Introducing a typology of the scale model beyond the iterative and the representative model, the authors identify the autonomous model as a provocative construction between past and present, idea and reality, that challenges and redefines the relationship between object, viewer and environment.The Model as Performance was shortlisted for the best Performance Design & Scenography Publication Award at the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) 2019.