Hybrid dramaturgies
ID
https://id.alexandremury.art/concept/hybrid-dramaturgies/
PREFIX
am:hybrid-dramaturgies
LOCAL ALIAS
am:dramaturgias-hibridas
AUTHOR
Mury, Alexandre
WIKIDATA
wikidata.org/wiki/Q136745013
AUTHORITY FILES
FBN: 000679706
ORCID: 0009-0008-9355-4876
ISNI: 0000 0001 2984 3253
VIAF: 15161329794452131121
Lattes: 7735731830748241
Itaú Cultural: 42031
PRIMARY DOI REFERENCES
doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17548245
doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20823388
SERIALIZED METADATA
metadata.jsonld
The concept is principally formulated in the author's own corpus:
MURY, Alexandre. Da blasfêmia à canonização: dramaturgias híbridas e o método autoimplicativo. Zenodo, 2025. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17548245
MURY, Alexandre. Desapropriação teórica: ficção crítica e metanoia hermenêutica da imagem. Zenodo, 2026. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20823388
Hybrid Dramaturgies designates a mode of artistic-epistemic practice in which heterogeneous layers of presence, mediation, materiality, recognition, temporality, inscription, and circulation are organized as an unstable, polysemic, and polyphonic structure of meaning.
The concept applies to artworks, events, images, actions, devices, or systems in which signs, gestures, archives, images, repertoires, or structures of symbolic authority are reactivated within another regime of relation. What defines the operation is not the specific nature of the sign mobilized — whether religious, artistic, popular, historical, media-based, patrimonial, or cultural — but its density of recognition: its capacity to arrive already charged with memory, expectation, authority, circulation, or symbolic value.
Hybridity, in this context, is not defined by the addition of media, supports, or languages. It designates the friction among layers that coexist without merging into a stable synthesis. These layers may involve body, voice, performance, image, object, montage, orality, text, archive, metadata, technical device, digital infrastructure, popular circulation, institutional reception, or algorithmic systems. None of these instances is mandatory in isolation. What defines the operation is the way they are articulated to produce tension, displacement, polysemy, polyphony, and reinscription.
Polysemy does not correspond to an arbitrary multiplicity of interpretations, but to the organized production of simultaneous, related meanings that cannot be reduced to a single reading. Polyphony indicates that the work does not speak from a single voice: different regimes of enunciation — inherited sign, body, object, technique, archive, tradition, institution, critique, circulation, or documentation — coexist in tension. Ambiguity may emerge from this field when meanings enter into oscillation, conflict, or undecidability, but it does not exhaust the operation.
In this sense, hybrid dramaturgies do not describe merely a form of artistic presentation, but a relational structure through which the work reorganizes the conditions by which a sign may continue to be seen, narrated, disputed, remembered, transmitted, processed, or reinscribed.
Hybrid Dramaturgies are artistic-epistemic structures in which heterogeneous layers of presence, mediation, recognition, materiality, inscription, and circulation enter into friction, reactivating signs or regimes of memory under new conditions of reading and producing polysemy, polyphony, symbolic displacement, and visual thought.
The concept is situated at the intersection of artistic research, practice as research, poietic epistemology of the image, semiotics, hermeneutics, performance studies, critical reenactment, postdramatic dramaturgy, the expanded field of the image, techno-aesthetics, and debates on circulation, infrastructure, and algorithmic regimes of visibility.
Its specificity does not lie in repeating these categories, but in displacing the idea of dramaturgy beyond theatre and dramatic text, applying it to situations in which images, bodies, devices, archives, objects, discourses, infrastructures, and circuits of reception become simultaneous agents in the production of meaning.
Within the context of the A.M.O., imagetic disappropriation constitutes a central and often originary operation of hybrid dramaturgies, but it does not reduce the concept to a category of appropriated or reenacted image. Hybrid dramaturgy names the expanded organization of layers that keep displacement active in the material, symbolic, discursive, documentary, and circulatory life of the work.
The genealogy of Hybrid Dramaturgies should be understood as an operative constellation, not as a linear derivation.
The concept is articulated with Warburg and Didi-Huberman, through the understanding of the image as a field of survivals, anachronisms, returns, and montages; with Barthes, through the understanding of the image as a polysemic field; with Eco, through the openness of the work without reduction to interpretive relativism; with Ricoeur, through the hermeneutic surplus of meaning; and with Bakhtin, through polyphony, dialogism, and the coexistence of social and discursive voices.
It is also articulated with Hans-Thies Lehmann, through the dehierarchization of scenic signs and the displacement of dramaturgy beyond traditional dramatic structure; with Rebecca Schneider, through the understanding of reenactment as uneasy persistence; with Flusser and Stiegler, through attention to apparatuses, technical images, and mediations that reconfigure perception, gesture, and memory; with Susan Leigh Star, Hito Steyerl, and Trevor Paglen, through the transformation of infrastructures, technical circulation, and algorithmic visibility into critical matter; and with Rosalind Krauss and debates on the expanded field, through the destabilization of disciplinary categories and the traditional limits of support.
The concept emerges from Alexandre Mury's artistic practice and from its critical elaboration. Subsequent writing makes explicit, documentable, and interoperable an operation already implicated in the conception, realization, and circulation of the works. Conceptual formalization does not replace the work: it reinscribes its force in critical and semantic language, becoming part of its poetic-epistemic existence.
Hybrid dramaturgies neither represent nor merely cite preexisting images. They critically reenact recognizable signs in order to reactivate their memory within another symbolic regime.
The displaced sign does not remain subordinated to its origin. It becomes a field of friction between recognition and difference, reverence and irony, presence and mediation, cultural memory and contemporary circulation. This friction produces multiple, simultaneous, and related meanings without forcing them into an interpretive synthesis.
Polyphony expands this field. In hybrid dramaturgies, the work does not speak through a single instance: body, object, archive, technique, institution, circulation, metadata, and critique may operate as regimes of enunciation in tension. The result is not a single message, but a composition of voices, temporalities, and mediations without definitive hierarchy.
Ambiguity remains important, but it should be understood as a localized effect within a broader field. It appears when polysemic meanings enter into oscillation or when polyphonic voices cannot be reconciled. Hybrid dramaturgy, however, does not depend solely on undecidability; it depends on the work's capacity to sustain productive instabilities.
The term “dramaturgy” does not refer to theatre in the strict sense, but to the tensional organization of symbolic forces. The term “hybrid” does not describe a simple mixture or formal synthesis; it describes friction, non-synthetic coexistence, and the sustaining of layers in relation.
In several works by Alexandre Mury, this operation manifests itself in the relation among body, image, gesture, object, icon, technique, and photographic record. The final image is the residue of an act: it arises from a situated action and stabilizes as image, while preserving the body, time, and tension of its execution. For this reason, these images do not only represent; they stage. They do not illustrate a thesis; they place the thesis in crisis. The thought that occurs in them is imagetic before it is discursive.
Through the Self-Implicative Method, subsequent writing does not comment on the work from outside: it prolongs its dramaturgical operation, reinscribing it in critical language and expanding its public existence without reducing its polysemy, polyphony, or hermeneutic openness.
Hybrid dramaturgies manifest themselves when an artwork, action, image, event, or device organizes heterogeneous layers in tension.
The operation may involve:
No specific medium is mandatory. The concept may operate in photography, video, performance, installation, painting, sculpture, archive, cinema, orality, text, curatorship, semantic web, knowledge graphs, digital practices, public events, or hybrid forms not yet stabilized.
The concept has a transmedial, trans-support, and transcontextual scope.
It applies to practices in which the work organizes a dramaturgy of layers: a tension among heterogeneous elements that begin to operate together without merging into a stable unity. These layers may be bodily, technical, material, symbolic, discursive, infrastructural, exhibitionary, curatorial, documentary, social, or algorithmic.
Its field of application includes visual, performatic, photographic, videographic, textual, sonic, installative, curatorial, digital, semantic, or transmedia works, provided that hybridity produces a dramaturgical structure of meaning, and not merely an accumulation of media.
The initial application in the works of Alexandre Mury constitutes an operational instance of formulation, not a limit of the concept. Hybrid Dramaturgies may be mobilized to analyze other works and practices that articulate recognizable signs, heterogeneous layers, symbolic displacement, multiplicity of meanings, coexistence of voices, and circulation as constitutive parts of the operation.
The concept does not apply to any multimedia work merely because it combines supports, nor to any open, ambiguous, or polysemic work in a generic sense. The minimal condition is that the relation among layers produce a dramaturgical structure of meaning: a field in which polysemy, polyphony, mediation, recognition, and circulation act together in the symbolic reorganization of the work.
Postdramatic dramaturgy displaces theatre beyond the centrality of drama, linear narrative, and the subordination of scenic elements to the text. Hybrid Dramaturgies dialogue with this displacement, but operate within the expanded field of the image, performance, technical mediation, documentation, circulation, and semantic infrastructure.
The main difference lies in the place of dramaturgy: in the postdramatic, it is still organized from the problem of theatre and the stage; in hybrid dramaturgies, it is organized from the instability among image, recognizable sign, mediation, inscription, circulation, polysemy, polyphony, and regimes of reading.
The expanded field of the image emphasizes the enlargement of supports, media, disciplinary borders, and conditions of presentation of the image. Hybrid Dramaturgies may operate within this field, but they are not identical to it: their focus is not only the formal or disciplinary expansion of support, but the dramaturgical structure produced by the tension among heterogeneous layers.
Hybrid Dramaturgies are not synonymous with multimedia works. The simple combination of supports, techniques, or languages is not sufficient to characterize the concept. Hybridity becomes dramaturgical only when the relation among layers produces structural tension, symbolic displacement, polysemy, and hermeneutic openness.
Hybrid Dramaturgies should not be confused with intertextuality. Intertextuality describes relations among texts, images, artworks, or discourses. In hybrid dramaturgies, the problem is not only the relation among references, but the reorganization of the conditions of recognition, mediation, circulation, and reading.
Hybrid Dramaturgies are not synonymous with polysemy. A work may be polysemic without organizing heterogeneous layers as dramaturgy. In hybrid dramaturgies, polysemy emerges from the relation among presence, mediation, recognition, displacement, inscription, and circulation.
Hybrid Dramaturgies should not be confused with polyphony in a literary, musical, or discursive sense. Polyphony is mobilized here as an expanded operator: it designates the coexistence of voices, regimes of enunciation, temporalities, institutions, archives, techniques, and positions of reading. It integrates hybrid dramaturgy, but does not replace it.
Hybrid Dramaturgies should not be reduced to ambiguity. Ambiguity is a possible effect of the coexistence of meanings, voices, and layers, especially when they produce oscillation or undecidability. The concept, however, describes the polysemic and polyphonic organization of heterogeneous layers in tension.
skos:related → am:imagetic-disappropriation
Imagetic Disappropriation — central operation through which the icon detaches from its symbolic matrix and acquires critical autonomy.
skos:related → am:self-implicative-method
Self-Implicative Method — reflective continuity of the artistic operation in the fields of writing, documentation, and semantic circulation.
skos:related → am:cultural-autophagy
Cultural Autophagy — specific modality of disappropriation in which a culture critically transforms its own signs of authority.
skos:related → am:algorithmic-canonization
Algorithmic Canonization — field of technical circulation in which the work may be reinscribed, repeated, indexed, and legitimized by systems of visibility.
amo:operatesThrough → am:critical-reenactment
Critical Reenactment — procedure of reenactment that makes explicit the distance between the source image and its new appearance.
amo:operatesThrough → am:polysemy
Polysemy — organized production of multiple, simultaneous, and related meanings, without reduction to a single reading.
amo:operatesThrough → am:polyphony
Polyphony — coexistence of voices, regimes of enunciation, temporalities, discursive instances, and positions of reading.
skos:related → am:structural-ambiguity
Structural Ambiguity — possible effect of the polysemic and polyphonic coexistence of layers, when meanings remain in oscillation, conflict, or undecidability.
amo:operatesThrough → am:choreography-of-cooptation
Choreography of Co-optation — mode by which the work anticipates, absorbs, or reinscribes mechanisms of symbolic, institutional, or algorithmic capture.
amo:hasInterpretiveRegime → am:reenactment
Reenactment — regime of relation frequently mobilized by hybrid dramaturgies.
amo:hasInterpretiveRegime → am:self-representation
Self-representation — regime of relation in which the artist's body critically replaces a preexisting figure.
amo:hasInterpretiveRegime → am:visual-citation
Visual Citation — regime of relation in which the source image remains recognizable, even when displaced.
For semantic-web use, Hybrid Dramaturgies should be modeled as a skos:Concept and crm:E28_Conceptual_Object.
The concept should not be reduced to a medium-based category such as photography, performance, video, installation, archive, or digital art. Its defining feature is the articulation of multiple layers — body, sign, object, technical capture, voice, archive, writing, circulation, metadata, and reception — as a single epistemic-dramaturgical operation.
Hybrid Dramaturgies should also not be reduced to ambiguity. In semantic modeling, ambiguity should be treated as one possible effect of a broader structure involving polysemy, polyphony, displacement, mediation, and circulation.
Recommended class:
skos:Concept
crm:E28_Conceptual_Object
Recommended canonical label:
Hybrid Dramaturgies
Recommended original label:
Dramaturgias Híbridas
Recommended origin language:
pt-BR
Recommended conceptual domain:
am:epistemology-of-the-image
(amo:hasConceptualSource / amo:hasDialogueSource)
Distinct from Source — own publications: this field registers conceptual, critical, historiographical, and analogical references that inform the field of dialogue of the concept without being equivalent to it. Hybrid Dramaturgies is an authorial concept of the A.M.O.; the sources below indicate genealogies, analogies, frictions, and zones of interlocution, not exclusive origin or conceptual synonymy.
WARBURG, Aby. Reference to survival, anachronism, visual memory, and the afterlife of images.
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Reference to survival of forms, montage, anachronism, and the temporal complexity of images.
BARTHES, Roland. Reference to the image as a polysemic field.
ECO, Umberto. Reference to the openness of the work without reduction to interpretive relativism.
RICOEUR, Paul. Reference to hermeneutics and to the surplus of meaning.
BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Reference to polyphony, dialogism, and the coexistence of social and discursive voices.
LEHMANN, Hans-Thies. Reference to postdramatic theatre and to the dehierarchization of scenic signs.
SCHNEIDER, Rebecca. Reference to reenactment, performance remains, repetition, and unsettled persistence.
FLUSSER, Vilém. Reference to apparatuses, technical images, and mediations that reconfigure perception and gesture.
STIEGLER, Bernard. Reference to technics, memory, mediation, and the exteriorization of memory.
STAR, Susan Leigh. Reference to infrastructure studies and normally invisible systems of mediation.
STEYERL, Hito. Reference to circulation, technical images, and regimes of visibility.
PAGLEN, Trevor. Reference to infrastructures of visibility, machine vision, and technical mediation.
KRAUSS, Rosalind. Reference to the expanded field and the destabilization of disciplinary categories.
MURY, Alexandre. Da blasfêmia à canonização: dramaturgias híbridas e o método autoimplicativo. Zenodo, 2025. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17548245
MURY, Alexandre. Desapropriação teórica: ficção crítica e metanoia hermenêutica da imagem. Zenodo, 2026. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20823388
© Alexandre Mury.
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