What Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Does – IFTR Intermediality Working Group Call for Papers
| Type of post: | Association news item |
| Sub-type: | No sub-type |
| Posted By: | Abbie Trott |
| Status: | Current |
| Date Posted: | Fri, 17 Oct 2025 |
Intermediality CfP
What Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Does – Call for Papers
Whether we look out the window, onto our screens, or at a theatre stage, we see the same: roiling cultural, social, ecological, and political crises. The omnipresence of new media, enmeshment with various technologies – be it to seek distraction, comfort, answers or discord – and the pervasive effects of cross-media fact and fiction have brought about a peculiar blurring of multiple boundaries: between people themselves, people and technologies, technologies and media, and media themselves. The same applies to intermedial relations in theatre. Observing the IFTR host’s call for What Theatre Does, we will investigate how the complex interplay of media, narratives, and extratheatrical circumstances shape new intermedialities in theatre and performance. How does intermediality demand a broader planetary consciousness, expanding beyond human-centered-ness?
Incorporated as we are within these technologies, what does each component of each media do? What does mediation do to sound? To vision? To touch? To kinesis? Even to our carefully guarded "self"? As the world grows progressively more digitalised, narrativised (Anderson and Iversen 571), and technosymbiotic (Hayles 2), all our art making processes, too, can become subsumed into a generalized intermedial landscape or ecosystem. How can we deploy intermediality as a critical toolbox to challenge the corporate driven hype and instead drive and reflect an emerging global activist imagination? Immersion, alienation, enchantment, and subversion, media crossings and merging forms, intermediality in performance is simultaneously artistic, imaginative, political, strategic, and speculative. With that in mind, this year we will examine the ways medial, intermedial, and hypermedial performances and practices serve as a space for ideological experimentations and ethical discussions. We ask how theatre and performance consider TechNo-utopias and what their dystopias signify, where blurring borders between media collide and to which effect, and what spaces are opened up or shut down to shape and remix our perception of the rapidly changing world and its hidden affordances and threats.
In addition to examining new performances and technologies, we invite you to consider how the reinventions of classical and folk tales are used to renegotiate this historical juncture. From Machinengespräche (Machine Dialogues), simultaneously generated and performed with AI, to Lili, the upcoming Macbeth-inspired immersive video game set in Iran, our discussions in Melbourne will centre both on how intermediality in theatre and performance frames the unknown – whether the unknown comprises technologies, narratives, or cross-media interactions, and reframes or decontextualizes the known in the context of media-technological innovations. But, whose "known" is this? Whose "social" media? Where is the where of intermediality? Whose bodies entangle intermediality on screens, in dance, in song? What does intermediality do with/to indigenous beliefs and spirits?
In the context of intermediality studies, we, like our University of Melbourne hosts, ask the following: Which orthodoxies no longer hold? How much of our scholarship is wishful thinking? Are our methods and theories fit for purpose?
Further, we ask what does intermediality, as a field of study and artistic practice, do to reflect and address, reconsider and anticipate global changes immediately present and past as the world becomes more chaotic, more diffuse, more surveiled, and less controlled? How are we implicated in our intermedial research and art making?
We invite a broad range of submissions covering among others:
- Intermediality as social activism
- Inter- and hypermedial dystopias
- Intermedial dramaturgy and narrative practices
- Popular culture and cross-media borrowings
- Intermediality in war and disaster
- Intermedial adaptations, appropriations, and reinventions
- Post- and transhuman relations on and off stage
- Intermediality beyond theatre and theatre beyond intermediality
- Immersion and alienation in digital performance
- Affordances and implications of artificial intelligence in performance
- Ethics of AI in drama and performance
- Beyond human animal intermediality
- Intimate intermediality
- Intermedial memory and historiographies
- Feminist intermedialities
- Queering intermedial technologies
- Crip Intermedialities where machines meet bodies
- Indigenous intermedialities of engagement
You may also join a new special section on "Works in Progress" that may be productions, art works, concepts, scripts, and experiments in theory and science, which you want to bring to the WG for critical feedback and sharing in its early or middle stages of creation or conceptualization.
Please Note: We are open to all your research and art practices beyond this year's themes! Feel free to suggest new ideas and different ways to engage our incredible WG.
We would also like your suggestions for cross WG panels, which have been very enriching in past conferences.
Conference Dates: 6-10th July 2026
Conference Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia
The deadline for abstracts for working group papers is November 15
As always, we invite our old and potential new members to join the conversation and send your abstracts. We look forward to seeing you in Melbourne! Join us!
If you have any questions, please reach out to the working group convenors: Katherine Mezur mezur@berkeley.edu and Dancia Stojanovic danica.stojanovic-schaffrath@uni-graz.at
intermediality.iftr@gmail.com
What Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Does – Call for Papers
Whether we look out the window, onto our screens, or at a theatre stage, we see the same: roiling cultural, social, ecological, and political crises. The omnipresence of new media, enmeshment with various technologies – be it to seek distraction, comfort, answers or discord – and the pervasive effects of cross-media fact and fiction have brought about a peculiar blurring of multiple boundaries: between people themselves, people and technologies, technologies and media, and media themselves. The same applies to intermedial relations in theatre. Observing the IFTR host’s call for What Theatre Does, we will investigate how the complex interplay of media, narratives, and extratheatrical circumstances shape new intermedialities in theatre and performance. How does intermediality demand a broader planetary consciousness, expanding beyond human-centered-ness?
Incorporated as we are within these technologies, what does each component of each media do? What does mediation do to sound? To vision? To touch? To kinesis? Even to our carefully guarded "self"? As the world grows progressively more digitalised, narrativised (Anderson and Iversen 571), and technosymbiotic (Hayles 2), all our art making processes, too, can become subsumed into a generalized intermedial landscape or ecosystem. How can we deploy intermediality as a critical toolbox to challenge the corporate driven hype and instead drive and reflect an emerging global activist imagination? Immersion, alienation, enchantment, and subversion, media crossings and merging forms, intermediality in performance is simultaneously artistic, imaginative, political, strategic, and speculative. With that in mind, this year we will examine the ways medial, intermedial, and hypermedial performances and practices serve as a space for ideological experimentations and ethical discussions. We ask how theatre and performance consider TechNo-utopias and what their dystopias signify, where blurring borders between media collide and to which effect, and what spaces are opened up or shut down to shape and remix our perception of the rapidly changing world and its hidden affordances and threats.
In addition to examining new performances and technologies, we invite you to consider how the reinventions of classical and folk tales are used to renegotiate this historical juncture. From Machinengespräche (Machine Dialogues), simultaneously generated and performed with AI, to Lili, the upcoming Macbeth-inspired immersive video game set in Iran, our discussions in Melbourne will centre both on how intermediality in theatre and performance frames the unknown – whether the unknown comprises technologies, narratives, or cross-media interactions, and reframes or decontextualizes the known in the context of media-technological innovations. But, whose "known" is this? Whose "social" media? Where is the where of intermediality? Whose bodies entangle intermediality on screens, in dance, in song? What does intermediality do with/to indigenous beliefs and spirits?
In the context of intermediality studies, we, like our University of Melbourne hosts, ask the following: Which orthodoxies no longer hold? How much of our scholarship is wishful thinking? Are our methods and theories fit for purpose?
Further, we ask what does intermediality, as a field of study and artistic practice, do to reflect and address, reconsider and anticipate global changes immediately present and past as the world becomes more chaotic, more diffuse, more surveiled, and less controlled? How are we implicated in our intermedial research and art making?
We invite a broad range of submissions covering among others:
- Intermediality as social activism
- Inter- and hypermedial dystopias
- Intermedial dramaturgy and narrative practices
- Popular culture and cross-media borrowings
- Intermediality in war and disaster
- Intermedial adaptations, appropriations, and reinventions
- Post- and transhuman relations on and off stage
- Intermediality beyond theatre and theatre beyond intermediality
- Immersion and alienation in digital performance
- Affordances and implications of artificial intelligence in performance
- Ethics of AI in drama and performance
- Beyond human animal intermediality
- Intimate intermediality
- Intermedial memory and historiographies
- Feminist intermedialities
- Queering intermedial technologies
- Crip Intermedialities where machines meet bodies
- Indigenous intermedialities of engagement
You may also join a new special section on "Works in Progress" that may be productions, art works, concepts, scripts, and experiments in theory and science, which you want to bring to the WG for critical feedback and sharing in its early or middle stages of creation or conceptualization.
Please Note: We are open to all your research and art practices beyond this year's themes! Feel free to suggest new ideas and different ways to engage our incredible WG.
We would also like your suggestions for cross WG panels, which have been very enriching in past conferences.
Conference Dates: 6-10th July 2026
Conference Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia
The deadline for abstracts for working group papers is November 15
As always, we invite our old and potential new members to join the conversation and send your abstracts. We look forward to seeing you in Melbourne! Join us!
If you have any questions, please reach out to the working group convenors: Katherine Mezur mezur@berkeley.edu and Dancia Stojanovic danica.stojanovic-schaffrath@uni-graz.at
intermediality.iftr@gmail.com
