Sites of Transformation: Applied and Socially Engaged Scenography in Rural Landscapes

In this book practitioner and scholar Louise Ann Wilson examines the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and promotes the development of therapeutic scenography as an applied art form. Offering an account of her own practice combined with case studies drawing on artworks from Early Romanticism and the Land Art movement of the 1960s, Elena Brotherus (Finland), Tabitha Moses (UK) and Marina Abramovic's autobiographical walking-work The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988, China), this is the first book on the emerging area of site-specific and therapeutic scenography.

The book analyses how Wilson's interdisciplinary, site-specific walking-performances are created in rural landscapes and seek to emplace and transform a participant's experience of challenging life-events for which traditional rites of passage or ceremonies do not exist. The book explores the therapeutic effect of Wilson's practice, which becomes an instrument for personal and social change and can be understood as a form of applied performance practice. Case studies drawn from her own practice include Fissure (2011), The Gathering (2014), Warnscale (2015), Mulliontide (2016) and Women's Walks to Remember (2018). Each is illustrated and is supported by evidential material demonstrating the effects of the practice and research.

Using this series of case studies, Wilson investigates how 'transformation' is achieved through an interdisciplinarily, three-tiered methodological process and the application of the concept of the feminine sublime, which she develops into six scenographic-led principles. These principles were informed by theories and aesthetics relating to landscape, pilgrimage, Early Romanticism, and a close study of the approach of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries to landscape.