This thesis investigates scenography and scenographic practices as social, claiming that a critical framework of ‘social scenographics’ articulates how scenography and scenographics sustain social networks of humans and nonhumans. This is the case when scenography is undertaken as a crafting process, and when scenographic moments occur in performance and other life experiences. This practice-research inquiry began by investigating processes of collaboratively created scenography through industry projects. As a set and costume designer with a highly collaborative and ensemble approach, I am interested in more deeply recognising the scenographic practices of disciplines other than design and the impact of my scenographic thinking on other areas of performance-making. My practice developed a focus on the social (Latour, 2005), and a recognition of the collaborative work of nonhumans. Solo practice explored Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints (2016), offering approaches to balancing human-centric embodied experiences within a realignment of social agency. Further collaborative practice took the form of exploratory studio work and conversations with practitioners and researchers.

The thesis explores material agency and collaborative relationships in scenography (human-human, human-nonhuman, and nonhuman-nonhuman) through a focus on the social, to argue that conversations, and acts akin to conversation, are crucial in scenographic practices and social scenographics. Approaches to the social in this thesis focus on the work of Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory (e.g., Latour, 2005). Rachel Hann’s notions of scenographics and scenography as place orientation (Hann, 2019), and frameworks of expanded scenography (e.g., McKinney and Palmer, 2017) are also fundamental to the research. The arguments of this thesis address the critical potential of scenography, proposing a radical realignment of social agency in scenographic practices to de-centre the human and recognise the already present and active nonhuman actants.