Studies in Theatre and Performance

ISSN: 1468-2761 (Print) 2040-0616 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rstp20

Scenography expanded: an introduction to

contemporary performance

Nicholas Till

To cite this article: Nicholas Till (2017): Scenography expanded: an introduction to contemporary
performance, Studies in Theatre and Performance, DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2017.1413734

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2017.1413734

Published online: 12 Dec 2017.

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STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2017.1413734

BOOK REVIEW

Scenography expanded: an introduction to contemporary performance, edited

by Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer, London, Bloomsbury, 2017, 216 pp., £22.99
(paperback), ISBN 9781474244398

The title of this book refers unmistakably to art critic Rosalind Krauss’s definitive essay ‘Sculpture
in the Expanded Field’ of 1979. In this brilliantly incisive text, Krauss identified a new field of
‘sculptural’ practices (land art, installations, constructions, etc.) that straddled the borders of
landscape and architecture, marking a terrain that was quite distinct from the familiar carved
or cast sculptural object of history.
Scenography, of course, engages some of the same terrain as Krauss’s expanded field of sculp-
ture – it may, for instance, be both ‘architecture’ and ‘not-architecture’, to use Krauss’s structuralist
categories. At what point does architectural scenography cease to be scenography and become
the now recognised practice of performance architecture? (And does it matter?) In an essay on
this question in a section of the book on Architectural Space, Thea Brejzek argues that the work
of a scenographer such as Anna Viebrock allows for critical reflection upon architectural forms
and spaces that the ‘aesthetic imprisonment’ of the architect (the phrase used by Jacques Herzog,
who as part of the team Herzog and de Meuron is best known for Tate Modern in London, but
who has also worked with de Meuron in theatre) doesn’t allow – although a radical architectural
practice such as the Viennese deconstructionists COOP HIMMELB(L)AU might beg to disagree.
The question that this thought-provoking collection of essays poses is whether what has
been called the ‘scenographic turn’ in recent theatrical and performance practices marks a dis-
tinctively new field of practice demanding empirical investigation, and enquiry into why such
practices should have emerged, or whether we are dealing rather with a reconceptualisation,
or new theorisation, of existing practices – proper critical attention at last being brought to an
under-recognised and under-theorised area of theatrical and performance-making. The answer,
of course, is a bit of both, which is what this book so usefully offers.
In the introduction to the book, McKinney and Palmer suggest that scenography has increas-
ingly become an ‘autonomous practice’ (5). But within this expanded field, where scenography
may refer to activities as varied as installation, land art, guided tour or street festival, are terms
like ‘scenography’ and ‘performance design’ even still useful, let alone the practice autonomous?
(Performance design itself is a slippery term – does it imply design for performance, or the design
of performance, in the way that people talk of event or project design?). The book also recog-
nises, however, that a practice like scenography is always dependent; the first section of the book
offers chapters by Christopher Baugh and Dorita Hannah on the impact of new technologies
upon our conceptualisations of the ontology of the scenographic space, liveness, materiality or
bodily presence and absence; ontological displacements that remain whether or not technology
is employed. In this respect any art is relational, and relationality is, indeed, a key concept in
this collection, along with materiality, affectivity and agency. These concepts draw upon some
trends in contemporary critical theory and philosophy, and a handful of thinkers recur through-
out this book as points of reference: the philosophers Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, part of a
group of philosophers associated with the ‘new materialism’, or ‘agential realism’ – the theory
that matter has agency and that agency is always relational; the social-anthropologist Tim Ingold
on the relation between human beings and their environment. In a theatrical context, argues
Dorita Hannah (as cited by Ethel Brooks and Jane Collins in their chapter on the scenographic
2 BOOK REVIEW

performance of Romani identities), drawing on Barad, things (objects, environments, garments,

bodies) ‘perform’ as active agents in the performance event (96).
I have issues with some of the implications of the new materialism (Bennett’s promotion of
‘commodity enchantment’ as ethical project is to my mind perilously close to a celebration of
shopping). And some of the notions here are, of course, implicit in older phenomenological
approaches to theatre, which often drew attention to the performativity of space, objects and
bodies. Indeed, modern phenomenology and the new materialism sometimes share a common
intellectual genealogy in Heidegger. And if, as Timothy Morton argues in his book Realist Magic,
an example of the school of ‘object-oriented ontology’ that is related to the new materialism, art
does not add meaning (or enchantment) to a previously inert, meaningless world, then it’s not
theatrical practice that makes objects into agents – they are so already.
None of this invalidates this collection, which offers some genuinely new percepts and insights
into a range of related (and relational) practices that may or may not be usefully described as
scenography. Some of the chapters start by identifying a field of practice and then proceed to
theorise that practice (Nebojša Tabački on water as a scenographic material in a range of current
performance practices defined as ‘aquatic theatre’, for which Tabački draws on neurophysical
research to suggest the kinds of sensory responses that may be elicited from audiences by watery
environments); others start from a theoretical perspective and adduce works that exemplify the
ideas being presented (Maaike Bleeker on post-anthropocentric performance design, for which
she draws on Kris Verdonck’s 2008 performance End as a model). The essays in the collection
don’t (couldn’t possibly) address every aspect of the scenographic turn (e.g. what has been called
the sonic turn in scenography: sound is often mentioned as an aspect of scenography in the
book, but is never quite foregrounded as an issue – there are other studies that do that), but it
offers some provocative new ways of thinking about a whole range of boundary-blurring prac-
tices. In a chapter on scenographic agency, Kathleen Irwin talks of the ‘thickening’ of the term
scenography (111). Is it the term that has thickened, or the practice? And don’t things usually
get thinner when they are stretched to expand? Maybe, the concept of scenography does indeed
become less defined as its practice expands. But maybe in the process it summons into being the
thickened theoretical heft that Irwin refers to, and that suggests its coming of age.

Nicholas Till
University of Sussex
n.till@sussex.ac.uk
© 2017 Nicholas Till
https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2017.1413734