Reimagining Liveness, Immersion, and Participation in a Post-pandemic Theatre for Generation Z Audiences

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"Digital natives" is a term coined by educationist Marc Prensky to describe urban dwellers born after the 80s who grew up with digital devices. They are characterized by short attention spans, quick learning speeds, fast access to new information, a penchant for the visual than textual, heightened eye-hand coordination, nonlinear processing, and the ability to multitask. Prensky's hypothesis has since sparked much research in the field of student engagement across the globe, more so during the pandemic when these digital natives attended classes from their homes. Since the 1970s, artists began to confront live performances with a mediated presence. This marked the genesis of intermediality, where digital technology is incorporated into theatre practices. The pandemic has evolved this relationship further, prompting new ways of making and seeing. Intermedial theatre offers plenty of untapped potential in attracting digital natives to a growing "experience economy." Little has been documented so far, in writing or practice, on the relationship between intermedial theatre and digital natives. As theatre-makersreturn to their creative spaces in a digitized post-pandemic world, they need to take a hard look at what makes their work urgent, relevant, meaningful, inclusive, accessible, and most importantly, inimitable. Digital natives currently form the largest cohort of new audiences across the globe and will soon take the place of theatre's biggest stakeholders. If theatre-makers returned to their practice without considering how this demographic functions and operates, they risk losing them entirely to other more innovative forms of media.Through three sequential creative projects, this research intends to explore new intermedial theatre-making approaches targeted specifically at post-pandemic digital natives. Each project is framed by a theatrical focus (liveness, immersiveness, or participatory potential) and aims to materialize into a physical event from one location. The following questions ground the production of each project: *What are characteristics of digital natives that can be translated into the creation of a theatrical experience? * How can these characteristics inform the piecing together of text, space, time, bodies, and media in a manner that is accessible and meaningful? How does intermediality enrich the work? * How do current technologies (including digital devices brought along by audiences) support, mediate, and transcend the theatrical experience? How can these devices and software be utilized in novel ways?The goal of this research is to develop tools to welcome digital native audiences back into shared physical spaces while keeping them active, engaged, and involved through new means. The curation of these new experiences must ultimately be distinct from the way they consume and interact with digital media on its own. This research brings together artists from Europe and Asia and fosters new long-term collaborative opportunities between theatre companies, arts communities, and institutes of higher education. These opportunities further transnational and intercultural understanding in a digitized world that is getting smaller. A digital archive of interviews, observations, processes, practical approaches, productions, feedback, and self-reflections from each project will be made available to the public via a website.