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).
Benedetto, Stephen A. Di: - Stephen A. Di Benedetto is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre Michigan State University, USA. He is Associate Editor (Drama) for ASAP/ Journal and Associate Editor for Scene . His books include The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre (2010) and An Introduction to Theatre Design (2012).
McKinney, Joslin: - Joslin McKinney is Associate Professor in Scenography, Deputy Head of School and Programme Manager for the postgraduate course in Performance Design in the School of Performance & Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, UK.
Palmer, Scott: - Scott Palmer is Associate Professor in Performance Design and Director of Student Education in the School of Performance & Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK. He is the co-editor with Joslin McKinney of Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design and with Katherine Graham and Kelli Zezulka of Contemporary Performance Lighting: Experience, Creativity and Meaning.
Wilson, Louise Ann: - Louise Ann Wilson is a transdisciplinary scenographer, performance maker and researcher. She is the Artistic Director of the Louise Ann Wilson Company and a visiting lecturer at several UK universities.
