Between material and perception: towards an aesthetics of scenography

ABSTRACT The thematic framing for PQ 2019, ‘imagination, transformation, and memory’, speaks to a cycle of creative processes at the heart of both performance design and reception. More deeply, the central idea of transformation points to a kind of radical instability that is fundamental to scenography. This article explores the stakes at play in scenographic transformations to posit an aesthetics of performance design that is rooted not in the visual, but in the confluence of the experiential and the material. It will argue that the ever-present possibilities of change in a constructed or curated scenographic encounter generate a sense of instability through which the active experience of perception is brought to the fore. Thus, the aesthetic experience constitutes – as Martin Seel argues – a radical sense of presence in the here and now. This article sets out an aesthetics of scenography grounded in temporal encounters with the unstable. Moreover, I will argue that the experience of scenography is in itself a site of instability, eliding as it does the aesthetic framework articulated by Seel and those contained in Graham Harman’s ideas of object-oriented ontology. Thus, the instability of performance materials constitutes a unique form of aesthetic experience in scenography.