Scenographic Contraptions: Designing uncertainty and orchestrating error for the generation of participatory scenography

In theatre and performance studies 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 philosophers of cognitive science Gallagher and Bower call ‘a cocktail, a mélange of aspects that make up one’s affective state’ (Gallagher and Bower 2014, p.235). Through examples from my own participatory work I will analyse how –and to what extend– a performance designer can take hold of mess or unruliness by designing the uncertainty of the environment and by orchestrating error. I will explain how in specific works (Work space II: Attempts on Margarita (multiple drafts), 2015; Work Space III: Phishing Things Together, 2015; Hello Stranger East Midlands, 2023) I designed a ‘rich landscape of affordances’ (Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014) using sound, taste, voice, props, materials, bodies, technologies etc. and used the notion of ‘prediction error’ (Clark, 2015) as a way to violate the audiences’ expectations for the stimulation of novel paths of thinking and the creation of meaning, driving forward participation within these hybrid, ‘inefficient’, participatory performance assemblages. The audience–participants are understood to get a grip on multiple fields of affordances (material, cultural, social) 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). Based on qualitative data (interviews with the audience-participants and images), I will reflect on the inextricable material-immaterial (including emotional)-social interactions that took place in the specific works and will further analyse my ‘scenographic contraption’ methodology, using the notion of ‘scenographic error’ (Penna, 2017) which is designed deliberately within the scenographic contraptions to generate possibilities of interaction, affect and enhance sense-making from the part of the audience.