Scenographic contraptions: Practice-research methodologies of endurance and duration in a groundless contemporary performance landscape

A scenographer’s work in hybrid and participatory performance environments entails not only designing something that will be built but also figuring out how to orchestrate the audiences’ mutual enfolding with scenography in the expanding and shifting contemporary performance landscape; where scenography can be invisible, where it can be felt, walked, digested, made, ignored, found, but it can also ‘make us’ (Lotker and Gough, 2013). In my own practice-research I am focusing on such hybrid, participatory performance environments, and I am tackling their groundless, meandering, and often messy, aesthetics by following the enactivists’ call who propose finding ‘a disciplined and genuine means of pursuing groundlessness’ in the world, rather than try and find a new ground (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: 253). I am pursuing groundlessness using the notion of the ‘scenographic contraption’ (Penna 2013;2017;2023;2024), a method tool and framework I have developed through my design practice. Between May 2014 and October 2015, I devised three performance-experiments to investigate the dynamic nature of scenography-led performance practice: Work Space I (WS I), a workshop in which a number of participants created ‘stuff’ and co-created a collective artefact whilst conversing. The participants’ creations and the research insights from WS I consisted the material to devise Work Space II (WS II) a participatory, design-led installation. Elements from WS II developed in turn into another participatory installation Work Space III (WS III). I will reflect on insights from the Work Spaces and on my role as Lead Designer-Curator for the UK National Festival of Performance Design in the East Midlands 2023 (Hello Stranger, East Midlands) and will explain how the ‘scenographic contraption’ helped me generate participation through unstructured play, the use of senses (touch, listening etc.) and error (uncertainty, unpredictability and mismatch of expectations). Scenography in these works unfolds and expands in a dynamic network of relations (what I refer to as a groundless scenography) and this matters in terms of its creation and reception leading to the acceptance that there is not one cure to groundlessness, there is no telos, but enaction, endurance, reflection, awareness, ecological, and emotional intelligence, and some moments of clarity.