Musicalising theatre, theatricalising music: Writing and performing intermediality in composed theatre

This investigation combined musicality and theatricality in the creation of four shows: Bear with Me, The Empty City, Gentlemen Songsters and Warmwaters. Led by creative practice, the research identified four polyvalences that characterise Composed Theatre, a transformational artistic domain which offers distinct challenges for performance makers. These include tensions and resolutions between compositional and theatrical thinking; music and words; setlist and script; and finally persona and character. The research finds that these interplays not only lend Composed Theatre its distinct qualities, but offer a potential set of balances to strike for writers, performers, composers and musicians who mix music and theatre in intermedial performance.

The Operatics of Cabiria (1914): Intermediality in Early Italian Cinema

This article presents an intermedial analysis of the Italian silent film Cabiria by Giovanni Pastrone within the cultural context of its time. Employing theories developed by Werner Wolf and Irina Rajewsky, the article lays out the intermedial and transmedial relationships of Cabiria with other media, in particular opera, literature, and painting, and illustrates that operatic references are incorporated recognizably during key moments of the film. By contrasting these references with specific cinematic techniques, Pastrone demonstrates that film is able to elicit an operatic sensation and that film is a distinct and valuable form of art.

Handbook of Intermediality

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.