Beyond scenography

In recent decades, international scenography studies has emerged as a vital academic and creative domain. Key works such as Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer’s Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (2017) and Arnold Aronson’s The Routledge Companion to Scenography (2017) demonstrate that the concept of scenography has moved beyond the theatre to include potentially any setting. In particular, more or less new ways of theorizing scenography have led to a shift from asking what scenography ‘is’ to asking what it ‘does’ as an active, relational, co-creative and holistic agent of performance. However, this move away from understandings of scenography as mute and static background in the theatre, towards an expanded understanding of scenography, has also resulted in conceptual unclearness and frustration. For example, it is debated whether designers of set, lighting, costume, sound, video and so forth actually can be said to create scenography if it is conceptualized as a relational event happening in time and space. Another issue up for debate is the risk of the concept of scenography becoming useless if it expands to encompass potentially anything. It is in this complex, contested as well as celebratory landscape that Rachel Hann’s Beyond Scenography (2019) makes a seminal, academic contribution. Hann, in Beyond Scenography, focuses on the anglophone adoption of scenography, from the 1960s to today. In resonance with recent theoretical developments, she states that the ‘book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events’ (I). Structured in nine sections, the book consists of an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion, each introduced with a sentence from Hann’s manifesto, worth quoting at length since it neatly summarizes her theoretical quest: