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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.