On the wire

In ‘Scenographing affect at Sillgateteatern in Gothenburg around 1800’, Astrid von Rosen explores audience taste in popular culture and asks how earlier experiences of embodied, multisensorial, and spatial features, such as dance and equilibrist performances, can be accessed. She applies expanded scenography theory, seen as a co-creative, affective, and expressive agent of performance, and argues for the relevance of this to performance history. Scenography theory can function as a scholarly tool combined with empirical studies to access long-gone audience experiences in multimodal situations. The historical Gothenburg Sillgatan theatre is used as a case study. Von Rosen outlines historical interpretations of the theatre’s repertory and gives a new interpretation based on expanded scenography. She looks more closely into the diary of the industrialist and theatre-goer Patrick Alströmer, who is staged as an affective scenographing theatre agent through his diary entries. Expanded scenography theory makes it possible to analyse and access past relational encounters between performance (on the wire), place (Sillgatan theatre), and audience members (Alströmer). Von Rosen believes this allows for a re-interpretation of hitherto often ignored multisensory and multimodal features in theatre sources and new ways of engaging with popular and hybrid forms of performance, such as rope dancing.