ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the modalities of scenography, including in its expanded forms, and considers its linkages to forms of socially engaged art and design. In order to define some of the useful parameters for a scenographically informed design practice, it provides a genealogy of scenography and its development that contextualizes these new practices within a historically bound set of norms and traditions. The chapter identifies some the affinities this type of practice has towards anthropological collaborations, particularly in the way that scenography creates interventions in everyday life that construct fields of inquiry. The scenography of the Renaissance theater was a staging of urban space as a reflection of the social order. The chapter shows the challenges of defining scenography on the basis of any singular aesthetics, medium, infrastructure, or educational tradition. Scenography offers some useful tensions to a traditional ethnographic practice.
