# 2 Review: Rachel Hann's Beyond Scenography
My review of Rachel Hann´'s seminal Beyond Scenography (2019) was first published in Theatre and Performance Design, Volume 7 Issue 3-4, 2021. Scenography Journal now makes the text directly accessible to its readers. The reason for this is that Rachel Hann's work is attracting increasing interest in the Swedish scenography community, and beyond.
In recent decades, international scenography studies has emerged as a vital academic and creative domain. Key works such as Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer's Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (2017) and Arnold Aronson's The Routledge Companion to Scenography (2017) demonstrate that the concept of scenography has moved beyond the theatre to include potentially any setting. In particular, more or less new ways of theorizing scenography have led to a shift from asking what scenography 'is' to asking what it 'does' as an active, relational, co-creative and holistic agent of performance. However, this move away from understandings of scenography as mute and static background in the theatre, towards an expanded understanding of scenography, has also resulted in conceptual unclearness and frustration. For example, it is debated whether designers of set, lighting, costume, sound, video and so forth actually can be said to create scenography if it is conceptualized as a relational event happening in time and space. Another issue up for debate is the risk of the concept of scenography becoming useless if it expands to encompass potentially anything. It is in this complex, contested as well as celebratory landscape that Rachel Hann's Beyond Scenography (2019) makes a seminal, academic contribution.
Hann, in Beyond Scenography, focuses on the anglophone adoption of scenography, from the 1960s to today. In resonance with recent theoretical developments, she states that the 'book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events' (I). Structured in nine sections, the book consists of an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion, each introduced with a sentence from Hann's manifesto, worth quoting at length since it neatly summarizes her theoretical quest:
Scenographics irritate the disciplined orders of world.
A scenography of orientation is a scenography of feeling.
Skenographia has many legacies. Scenography has exceeded the scenographer.
Scenography is not set; scenography happens.
There are no stages without scenographics.
While all scenography is scenographic, not all that is scenographic is scenography.
Whereas slow architecture pertains to monumentality, fast architecture is scenographic.
Scenographics score acts of worlding.
Arguably, the book's most valuable contribution is Hann's thoroughly worked through and theoretically underpinned attempt at solving the problem with, on the one hand, an endlessly expanding concept of scenography, and on the other hand, the blurry relationship between scenography as event and 'systems of aesthetics politics, such as mise en scène' (133). To do this, Hann constructs two different, yet closely connected concepts. For Hann, 'scenography', understood as 'crafting of place orientation', is a holistic concept of and for the theatre, refers to the design of light, set, costume, video and sound, performing in resonance with other features. 'Scenographics' is defined as 'that which orientates interventional acts of worlding' (17) and address extra-daily features in or beyond the theatre. Importantly, scenographics can be employed to understand and critically examine features beyond the theatre that do not involve theatre methods proper and the work of designers.
While Beyond Scenography apart from the cover contains no images (discussed on p. 134), Hann throughout the text presents the reader with examples demonstrating her points. These examples include topics as diverse as gardening and marketing, or an oddly positioned chair rendering the atmosphere different, when, as Hann would say, it 'irritates' the normative flow of a line of neatly positioned chairs. Even if one does not always agree with Hann's at times deliberately provoking readings and statements, I find them clearly presented, often engaging and even fun, and therefore stimulating for debate and theoretical development.
Hann's theoretical framework combines Jane Bennett's new materialism, Gilles Deleuze's assemblage theory, Ben Anderson and Gernot Böhme's notion of affective atmospheres, Kathleen Stewart's concept of worlding (how the worldly encounters crafted worlds) and the idea of othering (ways of exposing and challenging expressions and orders of normativity) from Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology, to isolate and focus the body-centric ecologies of multisensory scenographic occurrences. Brought together, these approaches manifest a distinct move away from a distanced, visual-spatial way of understanding and exploring scenography into a multisensory, body-centric, shared as well as critically potent engagement. Even though Hann herself does not express her work as drawing on and contributing to an emerging post-qualitative and performative research paradigm, I suggest that looking at Beyond Scenography through that lens can be helpful when striving to understand her contribution. I propose that Hann's use of non-representational theory, her emphasis on the affective body of the researcher, her focus on relational phenomena (different yet not separated subjects and objects) as a basis of her scholarly engagement and the many creative ways she languages her findings, forcefully resonate with a performative paradigmatic shift.
Even though a few years have passed since the first publication of Rachel Hann's Beyond Scenography, it remains a thought-provoking and much-needed theoretical contribution to the sprawling domain of scenography studies and related performance disciplines. The book's hugely relevant and historically underpinned theoretical take on such diverse topics as installation art, interior design, gardening and marketing renders it essential reading for a much broader academic audience. In fact, Hann's book has already had a distinct impact on scenography and art history studies in the Nordic context (Footnote1). Against this background, I recommend Beyond Scenography as necessary reading for scholars, students and practitioners engaged in cross-disciplinary studies of art and performing arts history and practice, architecture, urban sociology and beyond.
Notes
1 See the anthology Scenography and Art History, edited by Astrid von Rosen and Viveka Kjellmer (Bloomsbury, 2021) and the Journal of Art History's special issue on 'Scenography and Art History', 90 (2) (2021).
The review can also be found here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EBHITNVSM3K43PBXCVJQ/full?target=10.1080/23322551.2021.2003155
Best, Astrid von Rosen, professor of art history and visual studies, focusing on scenography