Intermedial Theatre and the Infrastructural Turn

Abstract

This essay analyses two intermedial theatre productions that bookend a historical moment of political and social transition in Hong Kong: Rimini Protokoll’s Remote Hong Kong and Zuni Icosahedron’s Bach is Heart Sutra. In both works, the audience participates in the action, the action is mediated by technology, and the performance environments are integral to the dramaturgy. Applying infrastructural thinking as a conceptual framework, this essay suggests how theatre studies might engage with the “infrastructural turn.” Infrastructure offers a productive lens for examining a style of theatre that highlights not the psychology of individual characters but the broader technological systems that mediate and organise our relationships to each other and the places we inhabit and that train our sensorium to see, act, and think in ways come to feel natural. As political crises and the becoming environmental of technology are provoking humans to rethink our autonomy and centrality, theatre is expanding its frames and displacing the human protagonist to foreground our participation within the infrastructures that sustain and constrain us.

Keywords

• Intermedial theatre
• urban performance
• infrastructure
• Rimini Protokoll
• Zuni Icosahedron

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