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).
