Designing uncertainty for generating participatory scenography

‘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: Phishing Things Together, UoL, October 2015). In hybrid and participatory performance environments, the audiences’ position constantly shifts and is not always contained within a specific viewing area, 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? Harpin and Nicholson refer ‘to the contemporary call to attend to affect – not as a subset of human sensibility but as a relational force that exists between bodies, objects and technologies’ (Harpin and Nicolson, 2016, p.7). I have added to the above relational force the word brains, and have reflected on audiences’ engagement with participatory messy states, using this understanding of affect as an embodied relational force, what Gallagher and Bower call ‘a cocktail, a mélange of aspects that make up one’s affective state’ (Gallagher and Bower 2014, p.235). For creating participatory scenography, I draw on the above understandings of affect as ‘relational force’ and a ‘cocktail/mélange of aspects’ and call it a ‘scenographic contraption’ (Penna, 2013). In this presentation I will analyse through examples from my own participatory scenography practice how –and to what extend– a scenographer can take hold of mess or unruliness by designing uncertainty within these scenographic contraptions.