Any discussion of bad costume is therefore a discussion on how costumes are judged to behave in line with expectations, whether agreed or implicit. Yet, I want to suggest that bad costumes can reveal the work of costume that may have otherwise been unseen or dismissed as frivolous. Bad costumes can offer a method for investigating how costumes are judged, understood, and politicised.

This article investigates the artist Sin Wai Kin’s (單慧乾) speculative approach to drag through the prism of ‘transgendering-assemblages’. Influenced by the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and Jasbir Puar, I propose that transgendering-assemblages actualize the properties of transness through particular trans techniques.

How is a feeling of world produced through staged material cultures? This question provides the through-line to my argument for this article. In an era of climate crisis, acts of representation that enact, invite or irritate conceptual models for ‘world feelings’ are increasingly urgent.

What do costumes do? I ask this question with two positions in mind. First, I am interested in how costumes produce a sense of atmosphere, occasion, or event. Second, I propose that costuming as a socio-material technology orientates feelings of world.

The concept of gender-assemblage is proposed as a critical framework to identify, critique and negotiate the more-than-human processes of gendering. Sin’s drag draws upon their non-binary identity to speculate renewed discourses, actions and expectations for gendered practices.

Interview with trans artist Ada M. Patterson (b. 1994, Bridgetown) based between Barbados, London and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, performance, poetry, textiles and video, looking at the ways storytelling can limit, enable, complicate or abolish identity formation.

This chapter charts the findings of a research project that examined Meyerhold’s lost architectural experiment using computer-based 3D visualisation as a research method.

Taking the UK Grime artist Stormzy’s performance at Glastonbury 2019 as a case study, this article investigates the tactics, technologies and processes revealed through the act of staging atmospheres.

This afterword for Tanja Beer’s book Ecoscenography reflects on the notion of ‘celebration’ as replacing ‘production’ in scenographic work cycles. The question I now ask is not why ecologically grounded scenographic practice should be embraced, but rather how.

Whether the fit of a hat or the flow of a dress, these costumed relations can alter an individual's performance. Athletes know this same relationship. To perform in a certain way again and again, requires a bodily preparation that is inclusive of the clothes worn.

To talk about ‘trans performance’ is to talk about performances that enact and investigate trans as a political act of affirmation, self-determination, and the felt affects of cis regulation. This paper is a working statement on the stakes at play in arguing the vitality of trans voices and perspectives for our collective social thriving.

Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings could be seen to represent stage environments. But at the same time, one could argue that, as with the stage environments they evoke, her paintings enact a feeling of place that others, complicates, and reveals normative orders of place. This is my starting point for proposing “painting scenographics.”

Foreward for Scenography and Art History introducing how to approach scenography as a crafting of borders. I always feel that scenography works best at a border. If you arrive to this book as an art historian, border thinking is one key for unlocking its potential for art history. Indeed, I encourage you to think of scenography as the crafting of borders.

Frederick Kiesler’s unrealized Endless Theatre (1916–26) project is employed as a case study for articulating ‘paradata’ in heritage visualization.

Reflecting on writing Beyond Scenography, this essay in English and Portuguese documents the lecture ‘Scenographic Futures’, presented as part of the session PQ TALKS, at PQ 2019, a position statements called ‘Changing the Question’is presented to reflect if rather than asking what is scenography, now the question is what does scenography do?. How scenography affects, channels, and orientate experiences of stage, place, and world.

For the Design Studio for Social Intervention, I consider ‘justice scenographics’ to offer a model for speculating renewed human-world relations based on a climate ceiling model of economics.

This article investigates a proposed focus of ‘critical costume’. Critical Costume, as a research platform, was founded in 2013 to promote new debate and scholarship on the status of costume in contemporary art and culture.

My embracing of ‘practice research’ (see Hann 2015) seeks to bring the established positions on conducting research through practice together under one heading. Indeed, I had become tired of the circular arguments that would occur about the differences between practice as/through/based/led research.

Beyond Scenography offers a manifesto for a renewed theory of scenographic practice for the student and professional theatrical designer. With sections on installation art and gardening as well as marketing and placemaking, this book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events.

Costume is subversive. It subverts the rules of a fashion system and exposes the theatricality of dress. Accordingly, the politics of costume are arguably a politics of ‘othering’: how the conscious subversion of appearance serves as an act of bodily estrangement. Yet, as evident in the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) tribes in June 2015, this othering is an active process that is undertaken equally by those engaged in the event of costuming and those who witness this act.