64 Perspectives on Practice Representational and Participatory Intermedialities in Katie Mitchell’s The Forbidden Zone and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke. Jemima Brown This essay responds to an essay question requiring reference to Christopher Balme’s theories of intermediality. Christopher Balme’s concept of intermediality, as outlined in The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (2008), emerges from his broader argument that contemporary theatre operates within an increasingly mediatised culture. Rather than existing as a historically “distinct” art form, theatre is shaped by its ongoing interaction with other media, particularly film and digital technologies. While Balme defines intermediality as the “attempt to realise in one medium the aesthetic conventions and/or patterns of seeing and hearing in another” (2008:206), this definition must be understood within his wider framework which emphasises theatre’s shifting position in a media-saturated cultural landscape. His framework emphasises that audiences are increasingly conditioned by the visual and auditory logics of media such as cinema and digital technologies, meaning theatre is no longer encountered as a singular, unified space of attention but as a hybrid form that demands new modes of engagement. Intermedial performance, therefore, not only combines media but fundamentally reconfigures how theatrical events are structured, perceived, and experienced. Both Katie Mitchell’s The Forbidden Zone and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke align with Balme’s definition by incorporating and reworking the sensory conventions of other media - cinematic techniques in the case of Mitchell, and digitally mediated audio structures in Rider Spoke. However, while Balme’s model effectively accounts for these perceptual transformations, it tends to privilege seeing and hearing as the primary modes through which intermediality operates, leaving less room for forms that foreground participation and user agency. To explore this, the essay distinguishes between “representational intermediality”, in which media reshape how performance is perceived, and “participatory intermediality”, in which media structures enable audiences to actively produce and navigate the performance itself. Katie Mitchell’s The Forbidden Zone offers a clear example of what this essay defines as “representational intermediality,” closely aligning with Christopher Balme’s model. The production stages the story of Fritz Haber, the inventor of
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