The 20th century witnessed multiple aesthetic and procedural changes in the field of theatre, namely in the close and complex relationship between theatrical text and staging.

The drama (between crisis and emancipation) was being shaped by modernist and postmodernist theatrical vanguards who left the reinvention of a theatrical practice as a legacy. The dialogue that directors and playwrights established with other artistic genres, with the visual arts and dance in particular, forced theatre to revisit its heritage and open up to new methodologies and creative practices, fostered by the inventors (and followers) of a theatre far removed from the centrality of the Aristotelian-Hegelian drama. Fragments, monologues, micro-fictions, material-texts and other textual forms today define the body of a deeply renewed drama, which occupies and contaminates, no longer the centre, but the margins of theatrical processes and objects.

This International Conference, which took place between 24th and 26th May, aimed to be an opportunity to reflect on this movement, through the analysis of theatrical and choreographic processes, methodologies and objects. With a view to sharing perspectives and critical views on the presence of literature (in its broadest sense) in contemporary dance and theatre, the conference sought to strengthen the dialogue between the two artistic disciplines and their respective fields of academic research, through the place of the text.