Intermediality and Esploratori dell’Infinito

Esploratori dell’Infinito originated as an explicitly intermedial project, conceived from the outset to span multiple formats and modes of reception. Its first version took shape in 2021 within the St[r]eam programme of the Festival della Scienza di Genova, where it was presented as a hybrid sound and audiovisual experience (see Supplementary materials). In this version, the work combined a recorded vocal performance by Claudio Boschi, an original text by Armando Rotondi, and music and sound design by Mirko Ettore D’Agostino. Alongside the auditory dimension, a visual layer, also created by Rotondi, contributed to the piece’s audiovisual identity, positioning it between radio art, digital performance and video installation. This same version was later included in the online programming of Futuro Remoto, further emphasising its adaptability to digital dissemination contexts.

The project subsequently evolved into a live performance format, reconfigured for the stage as an experimental performative study. In this theatrical version, the three creators Boschi, D’Agostino and Rotondi appear on stage, each embodying a distinct performative role: voice, sound and writing. The work thus shifts from a mediated, screen-based experience to a shared, co-present event, where sound design, vocal performance and textual construction interact in real time. This transition foregrounds the liveness of performance, while retaining the strong sonic and narrative components that characterised the original version.

A further transformation occurs with the adaptation of the work into a radiodrama, broadcast by Radio Svolta in June 2023 during the programme Accidit. In this format, Esploratori dell’Infinito returns to a purely auditory dimension, yet within a different medial framework: that of radio broadcasting. Here, the absence of visual elements is compensated by an intensified focus on voice, narration and sound design, reconfiguring the relationship between text and listener through the conventions of radio dramaturgy. Across these iterations (sound/audiovisual experience, live performance and radiodrama), the project demonstrates a continuous process of medial translation and rearticulation. Each version does not merely reproduce the same content in a different format, but rather redefines its expressive strategies according to the affordances and constraints of the medium in which it is realised. This multiplicity of forms establishes Esploratori dell’Infinito as a paradigmatic case for examining intermediality in contemporary performance practice.

As Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt argue, theatrical intermediality is not merely the addition of expressive means but a ‘relational space’ in which media redefine one another through interaction (Chapple and Kattenbelt Reference Chapple and Kattenbelt2006). In Esploratori dell’Infinito, Yambo’s text is not a literary source to be represented, but material to be dismantled and reactivated. The narrative cycles through various states – monologue, sonic dramaturgy, live performative writing, radiodrama and scenic event – ensuring the text does not precede the performance but is born and transformed within it.

Applying Chapple and Kattenbelt’s framework here requires a critical inflection. While intermediality is often conceptualised as ‘in-betweenness’, this project manifests it as a site of instability and productive tension. By deliberately subtracting visual elements, as in the radiodrama, the work forces the remaining media to fold into and compensate for one another. Intermediality thus shifts from a balanced interplay to a dialectical struggle that undermines medial autonomy. The resulting logic of poetic necessity redefines each medium under the pressure of absence.

The work thus assumes a processual form that recalls what Hans-Thies Lehmann observes regarding postdramatic theatre, in which the text loses its central function and becomes one of the many materials of scenic composition (Lehmann [Reference Lehmann1999] Reference Lehmann2006). Yet Esploratori dell’Infinito does not merely move beyond dramaturgical primacy: its specific intermediality lies in its continuous slippage between forms and devices. The same work exists simultaneously as a written text, an individual sonic experience (podplay), an online audiovisual product, a live performance with a frontal audience and a radio drama. This plurality of formats is not hierarchical, but horizontal: no version is ‘original’ or definitive, and each produces a different regime of perception and meaning.

Sound plays a central role in this intermedial device. The sound design and music by Mirko Ettore D’Agostino do not accompany the scenic action, but construct environments, rhythms and perceptual spaces, becoming a true immaterial architecture. In line with Brandon LaBelle’s reflections on sound art, sound is not a decorative element here, but a medium capable of shaping experience, producing spatial relations and activating the spectator’s imagination (LaBelle Reference LaBelle2010). Claudio Boschi’s voice, in turn, is not simply the vehicle of a text, but a performative instrument oscillating between narration, evocation and physical presence, destabilising the distinction between character, narrator and performer.

This interaction between voice, sound and writing peaked in the live version at the Campania Teatro Festival 2022. During the performance, Rotondi real-time composes on a typewriter a new scene dedicated to Neptune, a planet absent from Yambo’s novel and the radiodrama. Notably, the typewriter appears as a sonic element early in the radiodrama (03’16’’), establishing an intermedial link between the audio and theatrical versions. Rotondi writes the scene using audience survey responses, generating two copies live on stage.

At a precise moment (22’13’’), following the Saturn sequence and a countdown, Rotondi signals Boschi and D’Agostino to suspend their performance into a moment of cyclical sonic stasis. Once the new text is shared, Boschi vocalises it while D’Agostino improvises and processes sonic materials in real time. Following this, the performers rejoin the fixed structure to conclude the piece.

Here, dramaturgy is an intermedial event emerging from the negotiation of word, sound and presence. As Erika Fischer-Lichte observes, contemporary performance meaning is not transmitted but generated through co-presence and reciprocal transformation (Fischer-Lichte Reference Fischer-Lichte2008). Esploratori dell’Infinito embodies this, positioning the relationship between media and bodies as the primary site of meaning.

The visual element, although reduced and non-spectacular, also contributes to the intermedial nature of the work. In the audiovisual version developed for the ‘St[r]eam’ programme of the Genoa Science Festival (Boschi et al. Reference Boschi, D’Agostino and Rotondi2021), the image of a stretch of asphalt slowly transforming into the Milky Way does not function as an illustration of the narrative, but as a device of semantic slippage: a minimal image that, through digital transformation, opens up an imaginative and symbolic space. Here, the image does not compete with sound or text but places them in tension, producing an experience situated between experimental cinema, sound art and performance.

The intermediality of Esploratori dell’Infinito is also evident in its ability to traverse different contexts and institutions: science festivals, theatrical venues, online platforms and radio. In Esploratori dell’Infinito, the audience is never merely an addressee but an integral part of the dispositif: solitary listener, frontal spectator, active participant, momentary co-author.

In this sense, the work of Boschi, D’Agostino and Rotondi can be read as a practical reflection on intermediality understood not as spectacular hybridisation, but as a method. Yambo’s adaptation becomes a laboratory for exploring the possibilities of translating, transforming and reinventing an imaginary across different media, without ever fixing it into a definitive form. The exploration of the infinite, the central theme of the work, is thus reflected in the very structure of the project: an infinity of passages, versions and medial crossings that make the work an open process in constant expansion. Esploratori dell’Infinito therefore emerges as exemplary not because it uses many media, but because it destabilises them, makes them dialogue and renders them mutually dependent. The result is not a harmonious synthesis but a field of tensions in which text, sound, voice, image and scenic presence coexist without hierarchy, producing an experience that is at once theatrical, sonic, audiovisual and imaginative. It is in this instability, more than in any recognisable form, that its profoundly intermedial nature resides.

From narrative adaptation to immersive experience: Esploratori dell’Infinito as an interactive listening device

The adaptation of Esploratori dell’Infinito into the dramaturgical version proposed here occupies a theoretical and practical space that exceeds the traditional notion of intermedial adaptation. It is neither a simple transposition from novelistic telling to performative form nor a narrative reduction oriented towards scenic representation. Rather, the operation consists in constructing a perceptual device that reorganises the relationship among text, space and recipient, transforming narration into an immersive experience grounded in listening, the body and guided imagination.

Within Linda Hutcheon’s theoretical framework, adaptation is defined not as a product but as a process, that is, as a mode of audience engagement: ‘adaptation is not simply a formal entity but a process of reception and engagement’ (Hutcheon Reference Hutcheon2012, 22). The project makes this approach explicit by shifting the centre of the work from the adapted object (Yambo’s novel) to the recipient’s perceptual act. The source text, rooted in telling – one of Hutcheon’s modes of engagement – is reinterpreted not through theatrical showing, but through a form of imagined showing entirely entrusted to the listener’s mental activity and consistent with the notion of imagined space previously described.

This choice is declared from the very incipit, which assumes an openly metapoetic and programmatic value:

English translation of the quote:

The work thus defines itself as a ‘dream’, that is, as a mental space, and identifies voice and sound as its constitutive media. In this sense, Esploratori dell’Infinito fully belongs to the field of sound studies, where sound is not an accessory element but an organising principle of space. The adaptation does not ask the listener to imagine a space based on a description, but to inhabit it through listening to that description, to the voice that performs and conveys it and to the sound that creates, supports, and surrounds it.

Fundamental in this perspective is the long initial sequence of instructions addressed directly to the recipient, previously mentioned. This sequence does not have an introductory or paratextual function, but constitutes a true rite of threshold or ‘Turnerian’ passage, preparing body and perception for entry into the narrative world:

Through these indications, the listener’s real space (the living room, the landscape, the sky) is first acknowledged and then suspended, while the body becomes the primary site of the scene. The closing of the eyes does not eliminate vision, but internalises it: showing is not abolished, but transferred to the listener’s mind. In Hutcheon’s terms, we are already beyond mere telling and within a form of interactive engagement, since the work exists only insofar as the listener agrees to perform these actions. As Hutcheon underlines, ‘the audience’s role in adaptation is never passive; it is always interpretive and participatory’ (2013, p. 27).

Sound thus becomes the true architecture of the experience. This is explicitly stated:

This defines a poetics in which the soundscape does not merely accompany the action but generates it. Noises are not necessarily environmental; they may be abstract, informative, ‘like Morse code’: sound does not illustrate space; it constructs it. A particularly significant example is the scene of knocking at the door:

Here, the acoustic event immediately evokes an imagined domestic space and, at the same time, interrogates the recipient, who is called to situate themselves within it. This corresponds to what Michel Chion defines as son imaginaire, a sound that ‘does not represent an image but calls it into being’ (Reference Chion1994: 111).

The dramaturgy of movement further reinforces this immersion. The insistent use of dynamic verbs and perceptual questions transfers action from the narrative plane to the sensory one:

Movement is not narrated but made perceptible. The frequent countdowns in the performance text, often accompanied by breathing, synchronise the time of fiction with the listener’s physiological time, producing a form of bodily interactivity that aligns the work more closely with contemporary immersive practices than with traditional radio drama.

Within this device, words that evoke colour, light and matter play a central role. In the absence of images, expressions such as ‘black stones’, ‘dark mass’, ‘dazzling light’, ‘shining disc of greenish light’ function as true sensory catalysts:

Colour and light are not descriptive elements here but active forces: space acts upon the subject, overwhelming and threatening them. As noted, showing is therefore a mental construction entrusted to the recipient’s imaginative cooperation.

This cooperation becomes explicit in the continuous direct addresses:

This is not a branching choice in a ludic sense, but an interior decision that turns the listener into a travelling companion. Even more radical is the moment when the text directly addresses the body:

Here, the listener’s real body becomes the place where the narrated universe takes shape. At this point, the need to introduce a fourth mode of engagement becomes clear, alongside telling, showing and interacting, and not present in Hutcheon: listening. Not a passive act of reception, but a creative and spatial practice. As Brandon LaBelle observes, ‘listening is a spatial practice; it produces relations, proximities, and worlds’ (LaBelle Reference LaBelle2015, p. 18).

The closing of the work completes this transformative trajectory by returning the recipient to real space, but with a renewed gaze:

The journey into the infinite does not end in cosmic space, but in a return to the everyday, re-signified by the experience. In this sense, the adaptation produces an exponential and experiential effect: it not only transforms the source text but also the way the recipient perceives their own world. The infinite here is neither represented nor shown, but traversed through sound, the body and shared imagination.

If sound is the privileged vector in the construction of imagined space, it is because, as already noted, it operates not as commentary but as the true perceptual architecture of the work.

The centrality of sound, electroacoustic legacies and theatre as a space for the composer’s emancipation

Building on the reflection on imagined space and the centrality of perceptual experience, we now turn to an analysis of the concrete modalities through which this intermedial device was conceived and realised, with particular attention to the role of sound and the creative process that guided its genesis.

Esploratori dell’Infinito was conceived from its earliest stages as a research-through-practice project aimed at developing and testing an intermedial methodological approach to theatrical creation. The intention was not simply to integrate different media within a pre-existing dramaturgical structure, but rather to place sound/music, text, voice, scenic space and direction on the same ontological and operational plane, allowing the work to emerge through their reciprocal and continuous interaction. The boundaries between music, sound effect, noise and voice, as well as those between space, colour and movement, are deliberately made permeable. Esploratori dell’Infinito is therefore not to be understood as a traditional narrative performance but as an experiential intermedial device in which dramaturgy arises from the dynamic interaction among different semiotic systems.

Despite the absolute equivalence of all components, sound nevertheless assumes a privileged role – not in a hierarchical sense, but as a device for articulating and relating to the other media. In this perspective, sound is not conceived as a preparatory or decorative element but as a structuring force that actively shapes scenic organisation and the construction of meaning. The sonic element constantly moves between dialogue, sound effects and music, fluidly transforming from one domain to another. It functions, in turn, as text, as a mechanism of geographical, historical and cultural contextualisation, as a dreamlike space, as the inner voice of thought, and ultimately as a true instrument of scenic representation, capable of generating ‘objects’ that are not visible yet perceptually present. In this way, sound oscillates between mimesis and abstraction, between narrative and non-narrative dimensions, contributing to the construction of space, atmosphere and the work’s perceptual dramaturgy.

The project is grounded in an articulated process of sound design and the construction of the acoustic environment. While not strictly configured as an acousmatic concert, Esploratori dell’Infinito treats sound as autonomous dramaturgical matter, in continuity with the electroacoustic tradition and live electronics practices in the performing arts. Central to the work is the entirely performative nature of the sonic component: voices, concrete sounds, soundscapes and electronic processing are generated and manipulated in real time via controllers and live processing systems, while sound direction takes place directly on stage. This approach removes music from the role of a fixed soundtrack. It redefines it as a visible compositional gesture, situating the sonic act within the theatrical event as a fully performative action.

The centrality of sound and the project’s immersive nature consciously imply the adoption of compositional and processing practices closely linked to musique concrète, extended here to the theatrical context. Sonic materials are not used merely as illustrative elements but as genuine ‘dramaturgical objects’ subject to processes of transformation and re-signification. Throughout the work, sounds frequently traverse different degrees of surrogacy (Smalley Reference Smalley1997), oscillating between casual and reduced listening (Chion Reference Chion1994).

The Mars scene [18’ 12’’ – 20’ 34’’] exemplifies this sound transformation, as well as within the frameworks of Krause and Schafer. Initially, the scene presents a geophonic and ‘Martian anthropophonic’ soundscape (Krause Reference Krause2008): wind-like textures, low-frequency rumbles and subtle mechanical sonorities function as keynote sounds, signals and soundmarks (Schafer Reference Schafer1977), establishing a planetary environment that prompts an initial causal engagement with the source. As the scene unfolds, these sounds shift status. Through processing and rhythmic reorganisation, mechanical noises lose their referential function and assume musical roles. Conversely, musical elements transform into anxious, breath-like textures reflecting the explorer’s internal state. This shift follows Smalley’s surrogacy: sounds move from first-order to remote levels, where perceptual and expressive qualities dominate. Simultaneously, the listener shifts to reduced listening, focusing on texture, rhythm and spectral qualities rather than representation.

In this phase, the Martian soundscape evolves from a mimetic environment into an expressive space where landscape and internal perception converge. Near the scene’s end, this rhythmic layer reverts to the sounds of Martian technology, re-establishing a referential dimension. This continuous oscillation between referential and abstract modes makes the boundary between sound design and music unstable. The spectator enters a perceptual process – spatial, affective and musical – that demonstrates how sonic material in Esploratori dell’Infinito generates both environment and subjectivity.

This compositional and performative ‘freedom’, expressed in Esploratori dell’Infinito, closely reflects current expressive trends in contemporary performance practices. From the perspective of the electroacoustic composer and sound designer, theatre and contemporary dance today constitute privileged contexts for experimentation and research, especially when compared with other fields (cinema, television and certain forms of video art), in which the sonic component is frequently subordinated to predefined directorial choices and consolidated aesthetic models, all too often crystallised into recurring clichés. While it would be reductive to generalise across these heterogeneous fields, it is nevertheless common in many audiovisual production contexts for the composer’s intervention to occur relatively late and within pre-established structural and aesthetic constraints. Such conditions can limit the ability to influence the work’s formal and dramaturgical parameters, thereby reducing the scope for experimentation. By contrast, contemporary theatre and contemporary dance operate as active laboratories of experimentation, capable of transforming compositional practice into a performative, immersive and relational act, liberating the sonic component and redeeming it from subordination. Esploratori dell’Infinito explicitly aligns itself with these emerging models, positioning itself as an egalitarian creative process in which sound participates from the earliest stages in shaping the work, contributing to its form, meaning and spatial organisation through a genuinely intermedial approach. In short, it is a theatrical work in which the acoustic dimension does not merely accompany the image but co-generates it. Esploratori dell’Infinito thus presents itself as a counter-paradigm to the linear production logics of traditional audiovisual media, advancing a mode of creation in which dramaturgy emerges from the continuous negotiation among media rather than from the sequential application of specialised competences.

This egalitarian creative process, from the outset, represented both the guiding principle and the driving force behind the genesis of Esploratori dell’Infinito. Starting from an adaptation of the text, the work was constructed through an ongoing dialogue among dramaturgy, performers, direction and sound, within a co-creative context that decisively shaped the outcomes. Beginning with the textual adaptation, the three co-directors and performers undertook a meticulous analysis of the new dramaturgy to identify the core elements to be translated, at times through the spoken voice, scenic components (including lighting) and, increasingly central, through music and sound. The sonic component was accorded crucial importance from the outset, not only by the composer/sound designer. Once the necessary sonic materials had been identified and collected, a phase of selection and reworking followed, involving a re-adaptation of both the text and the overall structure of the work in line with the organic and stylistic choices matured on the sonic-musical level. Entire scenes were reformulated, condensed, expanded or repositioned not only in response to narrative requirements but also in relation to the dramaturgical and representational potential of sound.

The subsequent phase entailed creating a first ‘draft’ of the work in a fixed-media version, which, through an iterative process of rehearsals and feedback from all members of the group, led to the final configuration brought to the stage, in which all sonic elements are performed live. Despite its organisation into scenes, the work’s structure remains deliberately flexible and open: the performance is reconfigured each time, shaped by the interaction among the performers and the real-time sonic component, confirming Esploratori dell’Infinito as an emblematic example of intermedial practice in both the creative phase and performance, as well as an operational model for genuinely integrated sonic dramaturgy. The methodological choices described above resonate directly with the notions of imagined space and embodied listening previously introduced, enabling us to understand how these practices translate into a performative device centred on the spectator’s perception.

Virtual space versus imagined space

As previously noted, Esploratori dell’Infinito does not merely transpose Yambo’s original text into a theatrical key but reworks the theme of exploring the infinite as a perceptual, symbolic and imaginative experience, inviting the spectator to become an active co-creator of the performative space. From this perspective, the work does not propose an alternative reality constructed through advanced technological tools. Still, it is grounded instead in the idea of imagined space, a phenomenological concept that exists primarily in the participant’s perception and interpretation. Unlike virtual space, which is conceived as a digitally generated three-dimensional environment in which the user is immersed through VR headsets, sensors and spatialised audio systems, imagined space does not require immersive technologies: it is formed in response to perceptual, sonic, narrative and performative stimuli, becoming a shared yet personal mental territory that expands the spectator’s perception and awareness.

It is essential to distinguish between three levels that are often conflated because they belong to the same semantic field, yet operate on different planes: faculty, condition and product.

The clearest way to articulate them is to emphasise their hierarchical and generative relationship.

First, spatial imagination is the faculty, the cognitive and cultural capacity through which a subject structures spatial experience. At this abstract level, it is the mechanism that organises sensory input and memory into meaningful configurations, making the idea of space thinkable. From this faculty emerges imaginative space, the condition of possibility, rather than a concrete ‘where’, it is a qualitative, fluid field of potentiality. If spatial imagination is the capacity, imaginative space is the terrain it activates.

Finally, this interaction yields imagined space: the product. Here, space assumes a specific form and representation. It is a conceptual construct of meanings and relations emerging through perceptual or performative experience, rather than a measurable physical reality. The relationship is therefore a conceptual progression: the cognitive apparatus (faculty) activates an enabling environment (condition), which results in a formed spatial construct (product). Treating these terms as interchangeable overlooks this essential generative process.

Additionally, in theatre and performance studies, scholars such as Gay McAuley (Reference McAuley1999) distinguish between ‘presentational space’ (the space physically occupied by actors and scenic elements) and ‘fictitious’ or ‘imagined space’ defined as the space in which the action is imagined to take place, both on and beyond the stage (e.g., the castle of Elsinore in Hamlet). This space is constructed through text, gesture and audience perception, even though it is not materially present on the stage.

This notion is grounded in the idea that performance is not reducible to the materiality of the stage or more generally to any form of materiality (including situations in which the performative space differs from a conventional stage). Still, it involves spectators’ minds in the production of narrative places, where relationships among characters, stories and symbols generate a shared space of imagination. As Laurie Johnson, John Sutton and Evelyn B. Tribble argue in Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Sutton and Tribble2014), imaginative space – closely related to imagined space – refers to what the audience perceives and is produced by what is physically presented in the performance space and by what is represented in the drama, combining sensory, psychological, and social dimensions into a single complex spatial experience.

In broader theoretical terms, related concepts also appear in philosophy and cultural geography. Edward Soja’s notion of Thirdspace (Reference Soja1996) describes a space where the real and the imagined intertwine within lived perception, underscoring the importance of imagination in the production of meaning and spatial relations.

This perspective is central to performing arts studies, as it enables us to understand how performative space is co-constructed through the interaction of performers, text, the performative context (including production elements such as music) and the audience’s imagination, extending beyond mere physical space to encompass trajectories of meaning, memory, and perception activated during the performative event.

In Esploratori dell’Infinito, imagined space is not codified or predefined, but evoked through a combination of equivalent media: the text exerts imaginative power, the voice acts as a guide and a vector of suggestion, sound design and the audio score construct layers of perceptual depth, while the shared direction of the three artists and the performative instructions given to the audience transform the physical environment into a mental landscape in continuous becoming. The experience is therefore not that of being ‘inside’ an objective virtual space, but of inhabiting a place suspended between the real and the imagined, where the boundary between what is physical and what is generated by the spectator’s mind is deliberately rendered fluid.

The spectator is called upon to remain still and to move, to orient and explore, and to become a situated body within an unknown territory that simultaneously stimulates perception, memory, emotion and imagination. Consider the opening of the performance:

English translation of the quote:

Moving from this long but essential quote from the script, imagined space becomes a site of aesthetic co-creation. Each participant constructs a personal inner landscape in which the sequence of sonic and performative events is translated into mental images, invisible scenographies and individual narratives. The experience of Esploratori dell’Infinito thus approaches the practices of postdramatic and immersive theatre, in which the spectator’s presence, perception and embodied participation are central, as observed by Hans-Thies Lehmann ([Reference Lehmann1999] Reference Lehmann2006) and Fischer-Lichte (Reference Fischer-Lichte2008). Fischer-Lichte, in particular, conceives theatre as a field of transformative energy in which the audience participates in the construction of meaning through bodily and sensory perception. In Esploratori dell’Infinito, sound does not merely accompany the scene but serves as an invisible architecture, modulating perception and orienting imagination: every noise, echo, pause or vocal modulation contributes to the creation of mental environments that exist solely in the spectator’s mind, rendering the experience entirely subjective, albeit guided. Sound thus becomes a medium equivalent to light, movement and voice, in line with Chapple and Kattenbelt’s theories of intermediality, which suggest that meaning emerges from the interaction of media rather than from a textual hierarchy (Chapple and Kattenbelt Reference Chapple and Kattenbelt2006).

The use of imagined space also enables a radical rethinking of narration. Esploratori dell’Infinito does not follow a linear plot or a conventional dramaturgical conflict, but proposes an evocative, open and ambiguous meta-narrative that transforms the exploration of the infinite into a perceptual practice. This approach aligns with Lehmann’s notion of postdramatic theatre, in which meaning is no longer entrusted to narrative sequence but to presence, the simultaneity of signs and the spectator’s corporeal perception (Lehmann [Reference Lehmann1999] Reference Lehmann2006). In Esploratori dell’Infinito, the construction of imagined space enables the audience to mentally and physically ‘inhabit’ Yambo’s imaginary: the infinite is not merely cosmic space but the possibility of suspending stable references, opening listening and engaging with what is not immediately visible or narratable. In these models, imagined space is not merely an aesthetic complement but a genuine creative medium, capable of rendering performance open, ambiguous and dynamic, with meaning produced through the interaction between the performative event and the beholder’s mind.

This conception of imagined space finds parallels in other contemporary practices such as immersive theatre and sound art. The company This Is Not A Theatre Company, directed by Erin B. Mee, uses the urban environment and the voice to evoke complex mental scenarios, transforming real space into a laboratory of collective imagination without resorting to digital reconstruction. Similarly, the artists of Blast Theory create interactive experiences in which audiences, while moving through the real world or using minimal digital devices, are invited to complete the action through their own imagination, generating spaces that exist primarily in participants’ minds. Esploratori dell’Infinito situates itself within this continuum, proposing a performative study in which sound, voice and movement do not represent space but generate it, allowing each spectator to construct a unique and unrepeatable mental universe. From a textual perspective, the creative process of Esploratori dell’Infinito did not initially privilege a traditional theatrical framework but oriented itself towards experiential models consolidated in the social and economic sciences, capable of articulating the construction of imagined space in relation to the spectator’s experience.

In particular, the adaptation analysed here draws on the four ‘realms of experience’ formulated by Pine and Gilmore in their seminal text The Experience Economy (Reference Pine and Gilmore1999), in which the authors argue that organisations should ‘stage experiences that engage customers in an inherently personal way’ and identify four categories of experience: aesthetic, entertainment, educational, and escapist. According to Pine and Gilmore, these four categories (also known as the 4Es) are arranged along two conceptual axes (participation from passive to active, and the environment–subject relationship from absorption to immersion). Every experience can incorporate different levels of these elements to generate a memorable event (‘experiences that cross into all four realms: the entertaining, the educational, the escapist, and the aesthetic’).

This perspective on the realms of experience aligns with Bernd Schmitt’s notion of Strategic Experiential Modules (SEMs) (Reference Schmitt1999), which also served as a conceptual foundation during the early stages of textual development. Schmitt provides an operational framework for understanding and designing experiences through five modules: Sense, Feel, Think, Act and Relate, describing them as ‘the fundamental building blocks upon which the edifice of experiential marketing rests’.

Within Esploratori dell’Infinito, Pine and Gilmore’s realms were used to conceive of imagined space not merely as a scenic environment but as a multifaceted experiential field in which the spectator can perceive, learn, become emotionally involved and escape into narration. Integrated into this vision, Schmitt’s SEMs articulate the levers that activate these realms: Sense invokes perceptual stimuli to evoke an imagined world; Feel elicits affective responses; Think stimulates reflection and conceptual processing; Act promotes corporeal or imaginative participation; and Relate connects individual experience to a broader social and cultural context.

This dual theoretical reference enables us to conceive Esploratori dell’Infinito, in its original conception, as a dynamic, experiential, imagined space. Such modes of engagement reflect the evolution of immersive performing arts, a strand of contemporary theatrical research and practice that redefines audience involvement by transforming spectators into active participants in highly dynamic, multisensory performative environments.

In this sense, the work positions itself as a form of shared exploration, capable of activating levels of engagement, both experiential and in relation to Hutcheon, that range from entertainment to education, from aesthetic experience to cognitive and corporeal participation, thereby transforming the performance into a sensory and mental journey that integrates text, sonic innovation, and the potential of imaginative perception.