How can we come to know the possibility of our actions to reshape the worlds around us? The totalizing nature of the normative worlds we inhabit and their continual work to posture themselves not simple as possible worlds, but as the singular World, would have us believe that intervention is relatively meaningless. This necessarily forecloses possibilities for resistance—if this is the only possible world then there is no meaningful way to resist it. Thus, fracturing the totalizing narratives of the normative world creates the space from which resistance, and accordingly, change, is possible. In this thesis I employ scenographics, drawing from Rachel Hann, understood as place-orienting utterance, and scenography, the coordinated deployment of scenographics, to disrupt the ways bodies encounter an environment. From the work of Sara Ahmed, Quill Kukla, and Michel De Certeau, I utilize the co-constitutive relationship between the ways a body encounters an environment, both physically and phenomenologically, how that body is able to move through that environment, and therefore construct of the environment itself that everyday movement through an environment necessarily alters that environment. This alteration may be an instantiation and citational reassuring of a normative world and its bounds, however, it may equally be a disruption to that world. I site this investigation within the Wesleyan University Campus, utilizing my performance work in combination with an analysis of campus architecture. By, employing the notions of utopia from Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz, I assert that scenography, in reorienting us towards the environment around us, affords us different modes of agency and thus creates the possibilities of other worlds, shattering the singularity of the normative World. I argue that Wesleyan's campus is structured as a normative world to appear inevitable and unchangeable that, through scenography, can be show to be only one of many possible worlds.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Scenography","World marking","Utopia"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24079