Intermedial Theatre: On Technology

This chapter explores how theatre works both with, and against, the recognition of media materialities and the object-ness of media technologies. The traditionally material world of theatre has long embraced technology-enabled mystery, staging media spectacle to wow and amaze. Contemporary intermedial theatre continues to embrace the ‘now you see it, now you don’t moment’ of digital technologies. The following examines the aesthetics of magic and materiality as manifest in various contemporary theatre productions. While high-tech productions such as the RSC’s The Tempest at the Barbican in 2017 represent a ‘mixed reality aesthetic’, productions such as Daniel Kitson’s Analog.UE, Simon McBurney’s The Encounter, and Charleroi Danses: Kiss and Cry, eschew the ‘magic’ of digital media and stage the materiality of media technologies. It is argued that the specific intermediality and affirmation of materiality in such productions manifests a distinctly ‘postdigital aesthetic’ as articulated by theorists such as David Berry, Michael Dieter and Florian Cramer, resisting the fetishisation of the new that has been associated with digital culture.