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‘“Acting Out”: Illusion and Representation in the War time Landscape’

The article is one of twenty featured in the second collected volume in the University of the Arts, Zurich’s International Series on Scenography which are based on research from the Doctorate Programme in Scenography (Zurich: ZHdK and University of Vienna). Crawley’s article is developed from her doctoral thesis research on ‘Strategic Scenography’ and contributes a provocative and original analysis of uses of Second World-War Allied camouflage strategies as ‘scenographies’, in which, as Crawley argues, whole environments are re-envisioned from the ‘performative’ perspectives of the ‘camoufleur’. Drawing on archival sources and materials from the National Archives, UK, Washington DC (Naval Historical Foundation) and terrain models from the Imperial War Museum, London, Crawley’s article makes a convincing case for ways in which the war ‘scenographer’s’ control over the act of looking had significant implications, hitherto unrealized, for both acts of imagining and making war. These insights into construction of false landscapes as ‘mise en scènes’ are of potential significance to a broad range of scholars in this field for whom this collection’s theoretical, trans-disciplinary scope will provide a major new source of insight and scholarly direction.