Sites of Transformation: Applied and Socially Engaged Scenography in Rural Landscapes (Performance and Design)

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). "In this book practitioner and scholar Louise Ann Wilson examines the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and promotes the development of therapeutic scenography as an applied art form. Offering an account of her own practice combined with case studies drawing on artworks from Early Romanticism and the Land Art movement of the 1960s, Elena Brotherus (Finland), Tabitha Moses (UK) and Marina Abramovic's autobiographical walking-work The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988, China), this is the first book on the emerging area of site-specific and therapeutic scenography. The book analyses how Wilson's interdisciplinary, site-specific walking-performances are created in rural landscapes and seek to emplace and transform a participant's experience of challenging life-events for which traditional rites of passage or ceremonies do not exist. The book explores the therapeutic effect of Wilson's practice, which becomes an instrument for personal and social change and can be understood as a form of applied performance practice. Case studies drawn from her own practice include Fissure (2011), The Gathering (2014), Warnscale (2015), Mulliontide (2016) and Women's Walks to Remember (2018). Each is illustrated and is supported by evidential material demonstrating the effects of the practice and research. Using this series of case studies, Wilson investigates how 'transformation' is achieved through an interdisciplinarily, three-tiered methodological process and the application of the concept of the feminine sublime, which she develops into six scenographic-led principles. These principles were informed by theories and aesthetics relating to landscape, pilgrimage, Early Romanticism, and a close study of the approach of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries to landscape"-- Provided by publisher Cover Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Setting the scene – Sites of Transformation 1 Scenography with purpose – seven scenographic principles 2 Walking-performance – emplacing a life-event: Fissure 3 Creating a scene – centring the visual: Ghost Bird 4 Site and materials – centring the metaphor: The Gathering 5 Mapping-walks – centring the subject: Warnscale 6 Giving a voice – centring people and place: Mulliontide 7 Applied scenography – multiple applications: Dorothy’s Room and Women’s Walks to Remember Appendices References Index