Professor Joslin McKinney Inaugural Lecture

Joslin McKinney is programme leader for the Masters in Performance Design in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. She originally trained and worked as a theatre designer and her research deals with how scenography - design for and as performance - performs. Traditionally, scenography has been considered a craft-based and marginal discipline within theatre and performance studies, but Joslin is one of a small group of researchers internationally who have shaped the agenda for scenographic research, bringing rigour and focus to this emerging discipline and support a new generation of researchers. She has used creative practice (her own and that of others) to examine what materials - costumes, objects, light, architectonic space - can do and what they can make spectators think and to feel.
In this lecture, Joslin will show how a focus on materiality opens up a deeper understanding of how scenography operates. Scenography, she argues, is ‘a mode of encounter and exchange founded on spatial and material relations between bodies, objects and environments’ (2017: 2). And, as such, it is way of thinking through and with material and, as Mike Pearson says, a way of revealing ‘how things make things happen’. The insights yielded through this approach are not confined to theatre stages; they might be applied to other circumstances where materials, spaces and bodies intersect and bring new perspectives to the ways in which we experience and make sense of the world.

If you would like to hear more about these future inaugural lectures or other events in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries please join our mailing list here:  https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=PERFORMANCEANDCULTURALINDUSTRIES&A=1