Scenographic ‘stuff’: attending to everyday objects in performance (and beyond)

In part responding to our increasingly material world, this article presents scenographic strategies as a highly appropriate and effective means for cultivating an attentiveness towards everyday objects, or stuff. The centrality of physical matter within performances is garnering more credit, in correspondence with a growing critical, new materialist interest in the potential of non-human entities. In such discourse, objects usually perceived as passive or inert are instead recognised for their affectivity. This article takes a specific look at everyday objects that, caught up within capitalist commodification, are often solely valued for their ability to assist human action and yet can be seen to demonstrate aesthetic-affective potential – a potential that, as illustrated here, can be appreciated through scenography. Drawing on the philosophies of Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter, Maurizia Boscagli’s unruly stuff and Yuriko Saito’s everyday aesthetics, an original conceptual framework is developed and tested out on three examples of performance practice. This process of critical analysis foregrounds scenographic sensibilities – that orient spectators towards the latent vitalities, hybridity and ecologies of stuff – and reveals how alternative, attuned experiences, that interrupt consumer capitalist logic, can be fostered through performances as well as filtering out beyond them.