The predictive scenographer: Performance design as predictive affordance-o-graphy

We are finding parts of ourselves, playing, playing with the light, unexpected events […] wood, fabric, cameras, sound equipment, and a bit of alcohol. Shades of red, grey, it is pretty dark, you cannot see much. It provokes you in terms of fiction. (Participant S3, practice-research project Work Space III, October 2015). In hybrid and participatory performance environments, the audience’s position constantly shifts and is not contained within a viewing area, like in traditional forms of theatre, raising questions for the performance maker such as: How do I design the distribution of the experience of the audience? How do I contextualise this distribution? How do I frame this experience; and the feelings generated by a distributed design? In this paper, I will reflect through specific performance practice on how the free-energy principle (Friston 2011) and PP (Clark 2013) can be useful for a performance designer (scenographer) as a method for performance making but also as a way of contextualising what participatory performances do and how they do it. The audience–participants’ predictive brains are understood to get a grip on multiple fields of affordances (both material, cultural, etc.) simultaneously, and these become interweaved in the circular causal weave between embodied brain and world. The plurality of possible fields of interrelations the audience–participants make in relation to the design stretch across interoceptive, proprioceptive, and exteroceptive information, providing “a rich new entry point for accounts of experience, emotion, and affect: accounts that do not compartmentalize cognition and emotion, but reveal them as (at most) distinctive threads in a single inferential weave” (Clark 2015: 296). WS III’s scenography could be described as an embodied, and ecological playful. prediction algorithm that had the audience–participants as anticipating errors predicating the next moves in order to maintain the organisation of the performance system..