Moving stories < > Moving borders

Abstract

This article intends to articulate the concepts of border and intermediality crisscrossed by narrative. Intermediality as an artistic border offers a singular site to perform (to think and to exercise) exiles and migrations questioning within theatre. The imperfect overlap of geopolitic border and artistic border allows to renew the approach on narratives of de/territorialisation.
We will begin by reflecting on physical borders and its dematerialisation towards conceptual borders. Afterwards, we will step forward to the theatre of the real. Being a dramaturgy between the actual and aesthetic fabrication we will suggest that middle place – a permeable border – is built through mediation, via narrative or technology and that it outputs remediation.
As a basis for an applied study on contemporary dramaturgies, we will analyse the performance Moving People by Christiane Jatahy that addresses intermediality, fiction and expanded scene contrasting with Sanctuary by Brett Bailey. Both performances are rooted in the refugee condition which implies the negotiation of new regimes of visibility-invisibility, virtuality-reality not as polarisations but as a dialogue, where thresholds also blur.
In short, we intend to suggest intermediality offers an oblique form of access to narratives of the real where simultaneity implies the loss of incompatibility between ontologic oppositions due to hybridisation and remediation.