The Potentials of Spaces: The Theory and Practice of Scenography & Performance

This book is developed from the diverse and international research being undertaken in the areas of Scenography and Performance. The diversity of approaches has necessitated new methods of working, requiring artists to interrogate new media, and to develop a theory of making performance for differing spaces. Our research questions for this project were developed from the changed and changing practices of artists, academics and practitioner-researchers, who were engaged with making performance, positioning their own work within contemporary practice, historical precedent and across disciplines. What interested us and provoked this investigation related to a central enquiry as to what it was that practitioners and academics want to place in space as Scenography and as Performance. How does the space change and develop the project? How do these spaces simply allow us to be and to indulge in a process of reverie, memory and nostalgia? What are the problems of liveness in multimedia work and how do you create a sense of presence in the virtual space? We also wanted to look at the playing and rehearsal space, the dialectics of those spaces, using the imagination, technology and the notion of being transported in space, potentially transformed to a point where it becomes impossible to articulate a level of unconscious responses to the work we experience. The chapters contained in the book develop these theoretical discussions and cross boundaries of diverse performance companies and individual artists’ work.

Keywords: performance potentials, aesthetic visions, physicality, virtuality