Peppered with detailed photographs and intriguing sketches, this uniquely tactile book is an anthology of how the established concepts of performance studies are being applied to the investigation of designed environments. With erudite theoretical accounts augmented by visual essays, it locates the question of the performative within a wider discourse on design and encounter. Leaving the conventional approach of design for performance behind, Hannah and Harsløf have directed their contributors' attention toward ‘the speculative and projective act of designing performance and the embodied and ongoing practice of performing design’ (p. 14). Questions of performativity, embodiment, presence and the materiality of space are raised by a gathering of artists, architects, scenographers, performers and theorists.

Arnold Aronson opens the discussion by foregrounding light and lighting in twenty-first-century performance practice. Whilst he confronts the increasing use of projected imagery as a light source, Carol Brown and Mette Ramsgard Thomsen later examine its potential application as a choreographic device. Aronson makes an important observation as he notes that audiences can have a subdued reaction to an overuse of this technology, as in William Dudley's design for The Women in White, due to a familiarity engendered by our increased exposure to the aesthetics of cyberspace. This very familiarity is explored further by Jon McKenzie as he contemplates the visual dominance of Web design and new media. In a commendably bold move, he suggests that by approaching commercial and media design as a performance, we might yield new modes of shared understanding and even a collective sense of global communion.

Kathleen Irwin postulates a premise that appears throughout the book in various guises, as she argues the case for ‘spatial performativity’ (p. 39). Sound, as artist Brandon LaBelle points out, is sometimes the forgotten fellow of the scenographic toolbox. Nevertheless, his examination of how cultures of auditory experience shape our perception of space adds further clout to the argument that the impact of design and site can exceed objective models of spatial analysis. As a whole, the collection traces, with scholarly conviction and artistic ease, how the remit of scenography has begun to wander outside the conventional boundaries of the stage. From fine art to architecture, students and scholars alike will undoubtedly benefit from its lucid arguments, visual descriptions and the idea that the ‘autonomous art object’ has been surpassed by the ‘dynamic principle of embodied spatio-temporal event’ (p. 13).