Intermedial Theatre and the Infrastructural Turn

Yıl 2025, Sayı: 41, 19 - 29, 19.11.2025

Joanna Mansbridge

https://doi.org/10.26650/jtcd.1712176

Öz

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.

Anahtar Kelimeler

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

Kaynakça

• “About Us,” Zuni Icosahedron, https://zuni.org.hk/new/zuni/web/default.php?cmd=about&locale=en_US google scholar
• Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. Seeing Like a City. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016. google scholar
• Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. google scholar
• Fan, Victor. Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy Through Buddhism. google scholar
• Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. google scholar
• Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. google scholar
• Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011. google scholar
• Kattenbelt, Chiel. “Intermediality in Performance and as a Mode of Performativity,” google scholar
• Mapping Intermediality in Performance, eds., Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy google scholar
• Lavender, and Robin Nelson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, 29-37. google scholar
• Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. google scholar
• Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 42 (2013): 327-343. google scholar
• Shepard, Mark. “Toward the Sentient City,” in Sentient Cities: Ubiquitous Computing, google scholar
• Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, ed. Mark Shepard. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, 16-36. google scholar
• Simone, AbdouMaliq. “Infrastructure: Commentary by AbdouMaliq Simone,” Cultural Anthropology, https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/infrastructure-abdoumaliq-simone google scholar
• Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioural Scientist, 43, no.3 (1999): 377- 391. google scholar
• Woo, Mathias. “Mindfulness, Technology, Art.” Zuni Icosahedron, google scholar
• https://zuniseason.org.hk/en/z-live/mindfulness-technology-art/ google scholar