Theatre and Performance Research Association

The aims of this working group

To provide an ongoing forum via email discussion and access to information and resources via web pages.

To foster collaborative projects between individual members of the working group: encouraging the formation of a research community.
To present at the annual TaPRA conference, using modes suited to the scope of the group. To disseminate these both to the working group and to the conference as a whole.

To consider useful collaborations and interactions with other TaPRA working groups.
To provide an ongoing supportive environment, maintaining an awareness of the particular needs of postgraduate students and those new to the field.

To seek collaboration with innovative practitioners outside academia. To working alongside interested groups and individuals, and encouraging such practitioners to attend and contribute to the annual conference.

Co-conveners

The scope of this working group:

• Taking the scenographic as a particular perspective from which to research theatre and performance, the group:
• Addresses the visual, sonic, and musical, languages of theatre and performance.
• Explores the dynamic relationships between these elements in terms of the sensory experience of audiences.
• Considers ways of scoring, documenting, archiving, and analysing, scenographic practice.

• Scenography and technology
• The performing object
• The performance of light
• Computer modelling and the scenographic proces
• The aesthetic dimension of contemporary drama
• Languages of discourse for sound in performance
• The limits of representation
• Scenography and spectatorship
• Scenography and identity
• Live art
• Architecture and performance
• Site-specific practice
• Documenting the processes of scenography
• Devising from a scenographic perspective
• Archiving scenography
• Histories of scenography

Call for Papers for 2008 Conference

The Scenography Working Group invites proposals for contributions to the conference in response to one of the themes outlined below.Please send a 300 word summary for either a workshop* (max 45mins activity) or a paper/presentation (max 20 mins) to: Joslin McKinney ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Nick Moran ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) by 5th May 2008. Please include the space/technical resources you would need for a workshop.

The ethics of scenography

What does ethics mean in context of scenography?

* What are the social, political or economic dimensions of scenography? Does the, as Alan Read claims, a concentration on the ‘vision’ of theatre hinder the ethical dimension of theatre? How does the reception of scenography connect to ethical concerns? What is the efficacy of scenography and how does it make a difference to the ways we view the world? How do practices of scenography, past and present, articulate Christopher Baugh’s observation that scenography is an expression of a relationship with the world which reflects ‘complex human values and beliefs’.

* Scenography as spectacle has been both celebrated and criticised. Can scenography that dazzles and delights be more than just gratuitous consumption? Colin Counsell has called Robert Wilson’s work hollow in its ‘ literal incarnation of capital’. Is scenographic practice synonymous with extravagance and indulgence? What is ‘sustainable’ practice in scenography?

Scenographic practice and research

In what ways might practice and research in scenography productively
interact?

* How do we effectively document practice-based scenographic research? Where is the knowledge, how is it shared, with and for whom? What is the value of the documentation of scenographic practice (for example as seen at the Prague Quadrennial and currently at the Collaborators exhibition at the V&A) for/as research?

* What is the interface between academic and professional idioms in scenography? How do we describe and analyse practice? How does theory make meaningful interventions in scenographic practice and vice versa?

Scenography, Performance and the Body

We also intend to run a shared session with the Performance and the Body working group. Their mission statement is below:

Although the ‘body’ has been key to critical discourses since the 1980s, the impact of such discourses on understandings of the performing body has been limited. While ‘the performative’ has become a key metaphor for examinations of bodies in the social domain, the specificity of performance and its frames, the ways these impact on the actions of and reactions to the soma, have received far less critical attention. The group therefore recognises that there is still substantial research to be undertaken, especially in relation to interrogating cultural form.

Accordingly, proposals are invited for papers which address intersections between scenography and the performing body.