The University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (CDTPS) is excited to announce that the registration for its upcoming student-organized 28th annual Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) conference is now open and the conference schedule is now posted. The conference runs for two days from Thursday, February 27 to Friday, February 28, and will be hosted in various locations at the CDTPS’s Robert Gill Theatre and Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse.
This year’s conference titled Bodies in Flux: FOOT 2020 will address the body in its many varied conceptions in research, artistic investigations, and other enquiries. Throughout the conference, the following questions will be discussed and examined: How do we theorize bodies as a process: as a performance as well as a performer? How are bodies created and transformed through performances, perceptions, receptions, and theorizations of them?
FOOT 2020 has an impressive lineup of speakers including keynote speaker Professor Rebecca Schneider. Professor Schneider teaches theatre history, dance studies, visual culture and performance studies in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She has written extensively on theatre and performance practices that push the accepted borders around media.
Some of the featured presentations include CDTPS Associate Faculty member, Professor Terry Robinson who specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and will be talking about Spatiality and The Actor’s Body: Manifesting The Fourth Wall. Another featured presentation will be led by the CDTPS’s Institute for Dance Studies and The Dance Current, Canada’s leading national dance magazine who will discuss Lost in Translation: Punk, Whack, Waacking, W(H)Acking?
There will be a rich variety of interesting panel discussions, lectures, workshops and performances at this year’s FOOT conference. Participants are also invited to a special performance and artist talkback of Tarragon Theatre’s play The Runner on day two following the conclusion of the conference. Check out the full conference schedule to learn more and register today.
The Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) is an annual conference held by the CDTPS led by graduate students. The theme of FOOT changes every year, according to the research interests of the new artistic director of the conference, but its main goal is to provide graduate students and the performing arts community an academic outlet to showcase, critique, review, perform, discuss, and analyze the changing world of drama, theatre and performance.
To learn more about this year’s conference, visit Bodies in Flux: FOOT 2020.