Thematic fields

1) Formats

All contributions reflecting on the frameworks that, in recent decades, have enabled the participatory hypotheses and utopias to be re-directed to Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics (or other linked notions) will be submitted to this section: community theatre, festive-ritualistic revival, socio-inclusive experiments, new choreutic or choreopolitical paradigms, immersive theatre and, of course, participatory theatre.

2) Devices

This section will tackle the protocols of the different relational poetics, bearing in mind the procedures of those dramaturgies ‒ and postdramatic sistematúrgies ‒ that are expressed in the replacement of traditional playwriting (and its compact or continuous syntagm) with a programming of the becoming (more or less supported by the new technologies or the new connectivity frameworks).

The core of this programming is invariably the paradigmatic whole of discontinuous elements (and also the principles that govern the interaction between these elements). The reason why this ‒ theatrical, choreographic, computing, telematic ‒ device almost obviously harmonises with the protocols of the different relational poetics is that the device is, in itself, a field of correlations and intrications, a system open to the one thousand flexions of relativity.

This section would therefore include all the contributions aimed at shedding light on specific formal strategies in interaction devices, ranging from the dramaturgical strategies of pure participatory productions to the poetic uses of the Web’s potential for connection, immersive resources of interactive installations, choreographic objects, and the programmed experiences of self-performativity or social self-fiction (from the shopping centre to the theme park).

3) Mechanisms

This section will highlight the powerful expansions and inflations of relational poetics in the field of programming and cultural production in a broad sense: on the one hand, the highly consensual universe of current networking, the platforms of support for creation, and cooperation programmes; and, on the other, the rise of the new formats of poetic collectivisation and the new lexical fetishes (re-enactment, transmission, spillover, anti-pedagogy, etc.). All would be critically analysed as possible reflections on the rhetorical deterioration of a poetically genuine hypothesis. Also as signs of laundering of mottos and utopias ‒ at the service of programming and cultural mediation ‒ whose political feasibility is irremediably cancelled.