Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography

Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography is an essential resource for those interested in the visual composition of performance and related scenographic practices.

Theatre and performance studies, cultural theory, fine art, philosophy and the social sciences are brought together in one volume to examine the principle forces that inform understanding of theatre and performance design.

The volume is organised thematically in five sections:

• looking, the experience of seeing
• space and place
• the designer: the scenographic
• bodies in space
• making meaning

This major collection of key writings provides a much needed critical and contextual framework for the analysis of theatre and performance design. By locating this study within the broader field of scenography – the term increasingly used to describe a more integrated reading of performance – this unique anthology recognises the role played by all the elements of production in the creation of meaning.

Contributors include Josef Svoboda, Richard Foreman, Roland Barthes, Oscar Schlemmer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Schechner, Jonathan Crary, Elizabeth Wilson, Henri Lefebvre, Adolph Appia and Herbert Blau.

Jane Collins is Reader in Theatre and Wimbledon College of Art, London, where she currently co-ordinates the contextual studies programme. She is a writer, director and theatre-maker, who works across the UK and internationally.

Andrew Nisbet is a lecturer at Northbrook College, Sussex, teaching theatre practice and theory. He has worked in conference, exhibition, event and temporary structure design and museum installations.