Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography (review)

Change in the landscape of scholarship is often marked by a Companion, Guide, or Reader seeking to bring to the fore proposed parameters of the field. The arrival of Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography does this by assembling distinct theoretical and critical approaches to design for performance and thereby differentiates itself from two recent volumes that wrestle with the term scenography - Pamela Howard's What Is Scenography? (Routledge 2002) and the Cambridge Introduction to Scenography (2009) by Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth. While all three volumes wrestle with the basic term "scenography," this is an issue mostly for English language scholars rather than those whose subject is la scenographie, or sxfopdrav{>, or la escenografía. The English terminological issue is, however, analogous to the distinction in German between stage decoration, Bühnbildner, and the visual conception of the stage, Bühnenbauer. So what is the practice and what the object of study?

While Howard argues for scenography as a dramaturgical practice (for which her own drawings and notes about process supply evidence), the Cambridge volume offers to present an "understanding of scenography by examining the practices and theories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" (8). The editors, Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet, take their lead from the Prague Quadrennial (the foremost international exhibition of scenography), which has been renamed by its organizers for its forthcoming edition, the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space. The aim of this international event is to engage more intensely with the interdisciplinary dialogue between design and other expressions of visual and aural art, architecture, and forms of cultural intervention. In tune with the PQ of 2011, the editors leave "scenography" in their subtitle.

Such a reconceptualization of the field is endorsed in the foreword to the volume by Pamela Howard, who encourages a stronger link between practice and theory for a reinterpretation and reinvention of ideas relevant to contemporary students, practitioners, and scholars (xxiii). Her own emphasis on dramaturgy is here extended to an understanding of design and scenography as aspects of a comprehensive cultural phenomenon of processes, production, and reception. Collins and Nisbet do not place a special emphasis on studio practice, historical documentation, or theoretical perspectives but choose, instead, to organize the fifty-two chapters into five porous sections: "Looking: The Experience of Seeing"; "Space and Place"; "The Designer: The Scenographic"; "Bodies in Space"; and "Making Meaning." The editors briefly introduce each section, thus creating a framework for the practice and scholarship under scrutiny. The editorial framework does not quite contain the various approaches taken by the contributors to the various sections, but it does shift design for performance and scenography into a capacious cultural practice of performance, visuality, and technological invention. Head notes for chapters offer a series of keywords and descriptions that equip readers who have varying levels of experience and knowledge for what follows, and suggestions for further reading effectively extend the reach of each entry. Since the note on the contributor of each chapter is located in a separate section, the original dates of publication of translated work by Bachelard, Lefebvre, and others are not readily apparent. The editors appear to have restricted their range to work already available in English, a rather serious limitation for this topic. Over fifty black-and-white images, including drawings, are reproduced from the original publications of the contributions collected in this volume.

The juxtapositions of articles are helpful: readers are invited, for example, to relate Peter Crary's "The Camera Obscura and Its Subject," a historical perspective on machines for seeing, to Barthes on photography, Blau on "scopic drive," and Bennett on the interculturalism of the late twentieth century; and they are encouraged to conceptualize design for performance in relation both to pictorial notation of perspective in two dimensions, as theorized by John Willats, and to philosophical questions, raised by Bertrand Russell, regarding acts of perceiving objects, which reverberate all the way to Plato in...