BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Exware Solutions Inc.//ExSite v3.8//EN BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ExSite-EvtCal-1303-@citt.org DTSTAMP:20260315T011759 DTSTART:20211203T090000 DTEND:20211203T120000 SUMMARY:Scenographic City: using scenography to understanding urban exper ience DESCRIPTION:-- This international event discusses examples of urban sceno graphy and considers scenographic strategies as part of urban research a nd futures. --\n\n-- About this event --\n\nContemporary scenography, no longer confined to theatre stages, is now being used to interrogate and transform urban space. The 'place-orientating methods of scenography sh ape other social and art practices' (Hann 2019: 5) and it 'provides a cr itical tool to reflect, confront and realign worldviews' (Hannah and Har slof, 2008:19). Scenography can be 'a device for critically reflecting.. .intervening, defamiliarizing and re-orienting experiences of hegemonic spatial politics on an urban scale (Janssen 2019:208).\n\nNow, following prolonged periods of lockdown, the need to understand the diversity of urban experience and the ways in which people feel themselves to belong in the city seem more urgent than ever. Might the affective, creative an d imaginative dimensions of our lives that scenography deals with provid e new ways of thinking about the 'spatial politics of urban change' (Jan ssen 2019:208)?\n\nThis international seminar will consider examples of recent practice and ask:\n\n• what characterises a scenographic approa ch to the urban and to placemaking?\n\n• what can distinctively scenog raphic perspectives on urban experience reveal?\n\n• how do scenograph ic techniques facilitate change and transformation of the urban?\n\nSpea kers:\n\nMarina Hadjilouca (Cyprus + UK) Scenographic tactics in conte sted public spaces\n\nDorita Hannah (Aotearoa/New Zealand) Navigating urban scenographies of the ‘real’\n\nShauna Janssen (Turtle Island/ Canada) Urban Scenographics: Towards Partial Perspectives, Situated Pr actices, and Unsettling Existing Perceptions of Place\n\nJoslin McKinney  (UK) Understanding urban space as scenography\n\nSigrid Merx (Nether lands) Creative Urban Methods for sustainable urban futures\n\nResponde nt: Rachel Hann (UK)\n\nREGISTER\n\n---------------------------------- --------------------------------------\n\nDr Rachel Hann is Senior Lec turer in Performance and Design at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He r research is focused on the material cultures of scenography, costume a nd architecture. She is author of Beyond Scenography (Routledge 2019), w hich was shortlisted for the Prague Quadrennial 2019 Publication Prize. In 2013, Rachel co-founded the research network Critical Costume and in 2014 co-edited a special issue of Scene (Intellect) on costume. \n\nMar ina Hadjilouca - Scenographic tactics in contested public spaces\n\nIn t his presentation Marina Hadjilouca will present an open-source toolkit f or scenographic interventions. This toolkit aims to explore site-specifi city and social change through small triggering acts of multiplicities i n the contested urban site. The toolkit can be used as a tangible instru ment by performance designers, artists and architects who engage with ur ban sites in a critical way. Drawing from a series of interventions and workshops that took place in Cyprus and the UK, Marina discusses the pol itical potential of performance design when taken into the contested urb an milieu, outside the theatrical confines. Through these examples, she argues that performance design when informed by processes of social art practice and conceptual frameworks built on cultural geography, can be u sed as a methodological tool towards social transformation.\n\nDr Marina Hadjilouca is a performance designer and an academic, currently based a t Rose Bruford College. As a researcher Marina focuses on the use of per formance design as a methodology for politicised practices. Marina's res earch interests lie in the synergies between social art practice and per formance design. She has presented her research in conferences and sympo siums in Europe and the UK and has published papers in conference procee dings. Marina is one of the organisers of the Socially Engaged Design (S ED) Conference in Cyprus. As a practitioner, Marina creates scenographic interventions in contested public spaces and designs sets and costumes for theatrical performances.\n\nDorita Hannah - Navigating urban scenogr aphies of the ‘real’\n\nFor many reasons – including the ongoing p andemic – theatre has left the ‘dead air’ of its designated buildi ngs, seeking ‘the real’ in all its manifestations, which radically s hifts modes of spectatorship, performance and therefore scenography. The city itself, historically rooted in scenographic practice, is an increa singly performative environment: entwining the virtual and the material, while disciplining civic bodies with security fencing, stanchion barrie rs, fluoro-orange traffic cones and proliferating signage; all designed to regulate our individual and collective movement. This tends to limit our engagement with the urban environment, curtailing spontaneous self-e xpression while disregarding the city’s multiple histories, cultural m ythologies, and socio-political realities. However, the highly mediatize d global stage we occupy reveals a hyper-theatricalization of everyday l ife, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Presenting a rang e of key urban performance projects, including her own collaborative dan ce-architecture events, Dorita Hannah considers how challenging well-est ablished binaries – between mythos and materiality, safety and danger, theatre and city – can inform how urban environments are developed an d experienced, especially the Pasifika | Moana Nui City of Oceania.\n\nD r Dorita Hannah is a designer and independent academic whose practice an d research – operating across the architectural, performing, culinary and visual arts – focus on performance space and spatial performativit y. Her international projects range from theatre architecture (space-in- action) to public events (action-in-space), addressing the dynamics, pol itics and intermediality of the public realm. Hannah has published on Pe rformance Design and Event-Space, while designing, curating and directin g exhibitions, installations, performances, feasts, symposia and worksho ps. Her creative work has gained awards and citations and has been regul arly selected for exhibition in World Stage Design and the Prague Quadre nnial of Performance Design & Space.\n\nShauna Janssen - Urban Scenograp hics: Towards Partial Perspectives, Situated Practices, and Unsettling E xisting Perceptions of Place\n\nIn this presentation Shauna Janssen fore grounds scenographic practice as method for urban research, community-en gagement, and critical place making, with a strong redressive critique o f ‘urban revitalization’. Drawing from her curatorial work and the s ite-specific ARCADE project, she explores the critical capacity that sce nographic practices have to disperse, reframe and situate theatre archit ectures across multiple scales and experiences of the material, spatial, sociohistorical, political and cultural resonances and affects that are felt by, through and with urban change.Dr Shauna Janssen lives and work s in Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal, Turtle Island/ Canada. She is an Assistant Professor of Performance Creation at Concordia University, where she hol ds a University Research Chair in Performative Urbanism. She directs PUL SE, an interdisciplinary research-creation lab which focuses on site res ponsive, urban, spatial and material practices that redress and engage w ith themes of spatial justice and the politics of urban change. Her cura torial projects and performance design practice engages with interdiscip linary, feminist and scenographic methods to engage with questions of th e right to the city. She has published numerous essays and monographs on site-specific art, public space, performance pedagogy, and performative practices including with the International Journal of Performance & The atre Design, FIELD: a Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, and PAR take: the Journal of Performance as Research.\n\nJoslin McKinney - Under standing urban space as scenography\n\nThe effects of urban spaces on in dividuals can have profound effects on a sense of identity and belonging yet they often go unnoticed and unexplored. In this presentation Joslin McKinney investigates how we might attune ourselves to the spatial and sensory qualities of the city and the effects that they might be having on us. It draws on workshops in which participants pay special attention to the scenographic qualities of urban space and it considers how attun ement to the scenographic offers new perspectives on ‘the complex mate rialities of the urban’ (McCormack and Latham 2004). It is proposed th at creative, participatory methods developed in scenography could contri bute to investigations into subjective urban experience and that scenogr aphic attunement might be valuable as part of efforts to resist dominant narratives of neo-liberal urban space and construct alternative subject ivities.\n\nDr Joslin McKinney is Associate Professor in Scenography and Programme Leader for the MA in Performance Design at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the lead author of the Cambridge Introduction to Sceno graphy (CUP 2009) and co-editor of Scenography Expanded: an Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (Bloomsbury 2017). She has published articles and chapters on scenographic research methods, scenographic sp ectacle and embodied spectatorship, phenomenology, kinaesthetic empathy and material agency. She is co-editor of the Performance + Design book s eries for Bloomsbury that reflects the recent growth of scenographic pra ctices and the expansion from theatre/stage design to a wider notion of scenography as a spatial practice. Her current research is concerned wit h using scenography to understand the experience of urban space.\n\nSigr id Merx - Creative Urban Methods for sustainable urban futures\n\nIn thi s presentation Sigrid Merx will present the work of the Utrecht Universi ty interdisciplinary research initiative CRUM, short for Creative Urban Methods. Today, in academia as well as in urban planning, we can observe an increasing interest in creative urban research methods, on the one h and, and in collaborative approaches to city making, on the other. These comprise methods such as data walking, performative mapping, experiment al ethnography, dramaturgical analysis, and action-based research, resea rch by design, and critical making; methods that can be characterized as performative methods, mapping methods, and/or making methods. They, lik e scenographic practices, share a perspective toward spatiotemporal and relational structures of urban environments, dynamics of change and form s of mobility, and with a phenomenological emphasis on embodied experien ces. Presenting some recent workshops it will be argued that creative ur ban methods can be particularly valuable for addressing challenges and q uestions around sustainable urban futures and facilitating the necessary awareness and insight needed for a grounded actionability of academic r esearchers as well as citizens in co-creative processes.\n\nDr Sigrid Me rx is an Associate Professor Theatre Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University where she teaches in the BA Me dia and Culture, and in the MA Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturg y and MA Arts and Society. She is currently the Director of Education of the Department. Her current research focuses on the dramaturgy of conte mporary socially engaged theatre and performance practices, in particula r performative interventions in public space. She investigates how situa ted art and performance can act as productive sites to negotiate contemp orary frictions, concerns and debates in and about urban, public spaces. Sigrid is part of the UU research platforms [urban interfaces] and Crea tive Urban Methods and community member of the Creative Humanities Acade my. She is the initiator of the minor Creative Cities and one of the cor e members of Platform-Scenography.\n END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR