Festival of Original Theatre (Foot)

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO CENTRE FOR DRAMA, THEATRE, AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

28th ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE FESTIVAL OF ORIGINAL THEATRE (FOOT)

Koffler Student Services Centre, Robert Gill Theatre: 214 College Street, 3rd floor & The Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse: 79 St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

FULL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Description of Cover Image

On a light blue background resembling water with sunshine seeping through it, the conference poster is positioned at the centre of the page. It features the conference theme (BODIES IN FLUX), its title (FOOT 2020), and its dates (February 27-28) written in the middle in bold white font. There is a light purple and blue horizontal brushstroke behind the text in the middle of the poster, and a photograph of a dark night sky with small swirling stars as the backdrop. This poster is framed with text written in dark blue: the university, department, and conference titles at the top of the page, and the conference address and venues at the bottom of the page.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WELCOME FROM THE FOOT 2020 ORGANIZERS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………..……4 ABOUT THE CONFERENCE…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…….5 ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…….……8

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……9 MAPS: VENUES & LOCATIONS………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…...10 ACCESSIBILITY PROTOCOL………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...……18 TRAVEL & ACCOMMODATION………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….19 LOCAL RESOURCES FOOD & DRINK…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..….21 VISITING TORONTO…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……..….24

SCHEDULE-IN-BRIEF………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..27 SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS KEYNOTE LECTURE: DR. REBECCA SCHNEIDER (BROWN UNIVERSITY)……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….31 FEATURED PANEL & MAGAZINE LAUNCH: THE INSTITUTE FOR DANCE STUDIES AND THE DANCE CURRENT…………..……………………………..32 FEATURED FACULTY LECTURE: DR. TERRY ROBINSON (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO)……………………………………………………………………………………………….33

FULL SCHEDULE………………………………..…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..….34

PARTNERS & SPONSORS………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..77 SPECIAL THANKS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...78 CONTACT US…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………79

WELCOME FROM THE FOOT 2020 ORGANIZERS

Welcome to the 28th iteration of the Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT): BODIES IN FLUX. FOOT is the annual conference held by the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. The theme of FOOT changes every year, according to the research interests of the new artistic director and organizers of the conference, but its main yearly 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.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the many students and faculty who have helped make this conference possible by generously volunteering their time, efforts, and expertise toward the shaping of this event. Their work is evident in every aspect of the conference: in the exciting paper panels, workshops, performances, and special presentations that fill this schedule. With your help, we have been able to build a jam-packed and lively day-and-a-half of programming which speaks to the continued need for conversations around the ebb and flow of embodiment theories and practices in the performing arts.

We sincerely look forward to chatting with all of you over the duration of the conference and learning more about your exciting research and creative projects which are molding the future direction of our industry. Please remember to join us on the evening of Thursday, February 27 at the Robert Gill Theatre for our Opening Remarks and a highly anticipated Keynote Lecture by Dr. Rebecca Schneider (Brown University), followed by a catered reception to celebrate this opportunity to connect over our shared interests.

Thank you so much for your interest in BODIES IN FLUX: FOOT 2020. See you there!

Warmly,

Caitlin Gowans, Giorelle Diokno, Elif Işıközlü, Anna Paliy The FOOT 2020 Organizational Team

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

1. OUR HISTORY: PAST ITERATIONS

FOOT celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2017 with the theme Sounding the Inner Ear of Performance, an interdisciplinary exploration of the history and evolution of sound and aurality in theatrical and performative cultures.

Two years ago, FOOT 2018: Supporting Bodies / Changing Minds explored the inquiry: “How can drama, theatre and performance studies contribute to a barrier-free society?” The organizing team made accessibility and accommodations a central concern of the conference, an approach we aim to carry forward with us during this and future festivals.

Last year, FOOT 2019 titled the conference Equity and Diversity in Performance, and asked the question: What is the changing relationship of drama, theatre, and performance to practices which centralize equity through intersectionality?

See some past iterations of FOOT here:

FOOT 2019: Equity and Diversity in Performance: https://foot2019.wordpress.com/

FOOT 2018: Supporting Bodies/Changing Minds: https://uoftfoot2018.wordpress.com/

FOOT 2017: Sounding the Inner Ear of Performance: https://foot2017.wordpress.com/

FOOT 2016: Staging Realities: https://2016foot.wordpress.com/

FOOT 2015: Queer(ing) Performance on Stage and in Everyday Life: https://foot2015.wordpress.com/

FOOT 2014: Breaking the Body’s Boundaries: https://foot2014.wordpress.com/

FOOT 2013: Theatre & Technology: https://foot2013.wordpress.com/

FOOT 2012: Theatre & Learning: https://foot2012.wordpress.com/ 5

2. THIS YEAR’S THEME

BODIES IN FLUX: FOOT 2020 seeks to address the following questions:

How do we theorize bodies as a process: as a performance as well as a performer? How are bodies created and transformed through performances: through perceptions, receptions, and theorizations of them?

We intend for bodies in the above question to be figured broadly. With advances in AI, multimedia, and digitization in performance it is increasingly becoming necessary to reevaluate how we perceive and understand both liveness and human-ness on stage. We are encountering new ways in which bodies are formed, transform, and perform on stage. In addition to the focus on live human bodies on stage in studies of drama, theatre, and performance, we also apply the term “bodies” to bodies of text, governing bodies, bodies of knowledge, etc. Additionally, popular theories and bodies of thought available to us are given the prefix “post” such as postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminist, posthuman. This conference will create a space in which we pause to consider how we have arrived in these theoretical milieus (if indeed we have).

This conference will be an event in which scholars and practitioners who address the body in its many varied conceptions in research, artistic investigations, and other enquiries share their methods and findings with each other to uncover common ground as well as telling differences. The possibilities for being in and being as human bodies are radically changing in social, political, geographic, philosophical, and technological ways (to name only a few). This conference will provide the opportunity to pause in the midst of this flux to take stock of the ways in which we account for transforming corporealities in theory and in practice.

The Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) began as a graduate student-led initiative to showcase dramatic works. The conference has since grown to include not only performances but academic papers, panels, workshops, and working groups. FOOT welcomes both artistic and scholarly submissions of any type. These may take the form of performances, scholarly papers, workshops, working groups, studio working groups, pre-curated panels, roundtables, staged readings, works of art, installations, and any creative or embodied exploration of the annual theme. In the case of performances, we encourage submissions of low or no tech pieces.

This year, our call for proposals stated that possible topics might include but are certainly not limited to:

• Bodies in performance and on stage

• Bodies of text and bodies of knowledge and the ways in which they shift over time

• Altern or othered bodies

• Bodied and embodied work

• AI and technology in performance

• Augmented bodies in performance

• Sexed and gendered bodies

• Racialized bodies

• Enhanced bodies

• Post theories

• Posthuman and transhuman bodies

• Bodies in transit – migrating, traveling, or itinerant bodies

• Cyborg or hybrid bodies

• Trans* and queer concerns related to the study of bodies 7

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS Hi everyone! We are the BODIES IN FLUX team, and we are very excited to bring FOOT 2020 to you this upcoming February. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions! We can be contacted by e-mail via [email protected].

Caitlin Gowans Giorelle Diokno

Head Organizer Logistics and Venues Doctoral Candidate, PhD3 Coordinator Pronouns: She/Her Doctoral Candidate, PhD4 Pronouns: He/Him, They/Them

Anna Paliy Elif Işıközlü Communications and Social Media Coordinator Outreach Coordinator Doctoral Candidate, PhD3 Doctoral Student, PhD3 Pronouns: She/Her Pronouns: She/Her

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT

BODIES IN FLUX: FOOT 2020 would like to acknowledge the sacred land on which the conference is taking place. This land is the territory of the Huron Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory.

~ Adapted from the University of Toronto’s Elders Circle (Council of Aboriginal Initiatives)

MAPS: VENUES & LOCATIONS

LOCATION 1: MAPS Centre for Drama Theatre, and Performance Studies: Graduate Office Koffler Student Services Centre, Robert Gill Theatre: 214 College Street, 3rd floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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LOCATION 1: ACCESSIBILITY MAP

ENTRANCE: North West corner of St George Street and College Street Elevator available on right hand side

ACCESS: Please note that the entrance to the Robert Gill Theatre has stairs that are equipped with a chair lift

LOCATION 1: VENUES

Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies 1. Graduate Department Seminar Room 2. Robert Gill Theatre 3. Robert Gill Theatre Lobby

Koffler Student Services Centre, Third Floor 214 College Street Toronto, ON M5T 3A1

Capacity: 167 people Accessible: Yes

LINK: https://www.cdtps.utoronto.ca/facilities/robert-gill-theatre

LOCATION 2: MAPS Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies: Undergraduate Office The Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse: 79 St. George Street Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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LOCATION 2: VENUES The Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse 1. Performance Studio

79 St George Street First Floor Toronto, ON M5S 3L8

Capacity: 80 people Accessible: No (Steps)

LINK: https://www.cdtps.utoronto.ca/facilities/performance-studio-perf

The Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse 2. Walden Room

79 St George Street First Floor Toronto, ON M5S 3L8

Capacity: 30 people Accessible: Yes

LINK: https://www.cdtps.utoronto.ca/facilities/walden-room

The Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse 3. Front and Long Rooms

79 St George Street First Floor Toronto, ON M5S 3L8

Long Room capacity: 44 people Front Room capacity: 27 people Accessible: Yes

LINK: https://www.cdtps.utoronto.ca/facilities/front-long-rooms

The Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse (Adjacent Building): Morrison Hall 4. The Leonard Common Room (LCR)

75 St. George Street Basement Toronto, ON M5S 2E5

Capacity: 80 people Accessibility: The space is accessible for participants. The men’s washroom is not accessible.

LINK: https://www.cdtps.utoronto.ca/facilities/lcr

ACCESSIBILITY PROTOCOL FOOT is committed to making arrangements that allow all attendees to participate fully in the conference. Below are steps we kindly ask all presenters to take to ensure this is possible:

1. Access Copies: Presenters should plan to bring three (3) copies of their papers, even in draft form, for the use of attendees who wish to follow the written text. Presenters who use handouts should prepare some copies in a large-print format (Sans-serif font, 16-point type size). Presenters should indicate whether they want their papers and handouts returned. 2. When speaking, position your face at an angle that allows participants to read your lips. Avoid speaking while facing away from the audience, or while looking down at papers or screens. 3. Please say your name before asking a question. 4. Please describe any power points or visuals. 5. If you are planning on showing video during your presentation, please plan on captioning/subtitling your video or having transcripts available. 6. If engaging in experiential activities make sure you have planned for the inclusion of all, regardless of physical abilities. 7. Consider making it possible for attendees to obtain an electronic version of any text that allows for type size adjustments or use of text readers (creating audio from written text). 8. Please allow for understanding for anyone who may need to leave a space for a calmer environment during conference events. 9. Please allow for a smell-free environment, and refrain from wearing perfume or cologne.

Note on Tech: Our projector systems use VGA cables. If you will be presenting from a laptop, please bring your own VGA/HDMI adaptor.

Our goal to nurture an accessible environment is a process and so we encourage dialogue within the community and welcome feedback and questions. No single accommodation is suitable for every person, and the primary solution we invite is to consistently commit to continued conversations.

Gender Neutral Bathroom Protocol: Please note that the bathrooms in The Robert Gill Theatre are not gender neutral: as such, we will post temporary signs to create accessibility to this end on the bathroom doors for the duration of the conference. The bathrooms in The Leonard Common Room are not gender neutral, and the men’s bathroom is not accessible: we will create a temporary sign to this end on the women’s bathroom for the duration of the conference. There is an accessible, gender-neutral bathroom on the first floor of the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse. 18

TRAVEL & ACCOMMODATION

Here are some hotels conveniently located near the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus where you may choose to book your stay!

COURTYARD MARRIOTT TORONTO DOWNTOWN 475 Yonge Street, Toronto M4Y 1X7

INTERCONTINENTAL TORONTO YORKVILLE 220 Bloor Street West, Toronto, M5S 1T8

TORONTO MARRIOTT BLOOR YORKVILLE 90 Bloor Street East, Toronto M4W 1A7

CHELSEA HOTEL TORONTO 33 Gerrard Street West, Toronto, M5G 1Z4

RAMADA PLAZA TORONTO DOWNTOWN 300 Jarvis Street, Toronto, M5B 2C5

Here is how you can get to campus!

From Billy Bishop Airport: Upon disembarking from the Toronto Island Airport ferry, you will arrive at a parking lot that contains a pickup station for Porter’s personal shuttle (staff are on hand at the ferry terminal should there be any confusion in locating this). The airport shuttle will take you to the west entrance of the Fairmont Hotel at the corner of York St. and Front St. in downtown Toronto. From here you can catch a taxi or proceeded to the subway.

Subway/Go-Train/VIA: The west entrance of the Fairmont leads directly to a short pathway that connects directly to Union subway station. (Please note that this is the same station as the GO Transit and VIA Train Station). Once inside the subway station, take the Northbound train on the University-Spadina line to Queen’s Park station, which is located at the corner of University and College St. From here you are a mere three block walk (west) to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, located on the third floor of the Koffler Centre at 214 College street.

From Pearson Airport: Taxi: A taxi from the Airport to the university will cost about $60. Taxis are available at all terminal drop off/pick up zones.

Shuttle Bus and UP Express Train: Shuttle Service is available from the airport to several downtown locations. Tickets for the shuttles can purchased in advance for approximately $26 by visiting: http://www.torontoairportexpress.com/. The shuttle bus deposits passengers to the West Entrance of the Fairmont Royal York Hotel. The west entrance of the Fairmont leads directly to a short pathway that connects to Union subway station. Once inside the subway station, take the Northbound train on the University-Spadina line to Queen’s Park station, which is located at the corner of University and College St. From here you are a mere three block walk (west) to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, located on the third floor of the Koffler Centre, at 214 College street. The UP Express Train costs about $12 and makes stops at both Bloor Street and Union Station, from which you can take direct subways to campus. Tickets can be purchased onsite at Terminal 1 or online by visiting: https://www.upexpress.com/Tickets/BuyTickets/

Additionally, http://www.myttc.ca is a valuable resource for planning trips within the city of Toronto.

LOCAL RESOURCES FOOD & DRINK

Here is a great resource for accessible eating and drinking in Toronto: http://www.accessto.ca/ And here are a few local spots you might enjoy!

Cafés & Bakeries

Second Cup Tim Horton’s Café Reznikoff 214 College St 455 Spadina Ave 75 St. George St 1st Floor Koffler Student Services Building 4 minute walk from CDTPS (240m) 8 minute walk from CDTPS (650m) Downstairs from Centre for Drama, Wheelchair accessible Wheelchair accessible Theatre and Performance Studies Coffee and pastries Coffee, sandwiches, and snacks Accessible by elevator Vegetarian options available Vegan and vegetarian options available Coffee and pastries Gluten-free and vegetarian options available

Second Cup – Second Location Jimmy’s L’Espresso Bar Mercurio 66 Harbord St 191 Baldwin St 321 Bloor St West 11 minute walk from CDTPS (850m) 10 minute walk from CDTPS (800m) 14 minute walk from CDTPS (1.1km) Wheelchair accessible Not wheelchair accessible Wheelchair accessible Coffee and pastries Coffee and pastries Coffee shop with baked goods and light Gluten-free and vegetarian options Gluten-free and vegan options available lunch fare available Gluten-free and vegan options available

Lunch & Dinner

Mother’s Dumplings Kinton Ramen El Trompo 421 Spadina Ave 51 Baldwin St 277 Augusta Ave 5 minute walk from CDTPS (350m) 6 minute walk from CDTPS (450m) 9 minute walk from CDTPS (700m) Not wheelchair accessible Not wheelchair accessible Wheelchair accessible A la carte dumplings and side dishes Ramen bar Taco bar Vegetarian options available Vegan and vegetarian options available Vegan and vegetarian options available

Urban Herbivore Free Times Cafe 64 Oxford St Gallery Grill – Hart House 320 College St 9 minute walk from CDTPS (700m) 7 Hart House Circle, 2nd Floor 6 minute walk from CDTPS (500m) Wheelchair accessible 10 minute walk from CDTPS (800m) Wheelchair accessible Vegetarian and Vegan take-out with Wheelchair accessible (accessible Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Canadian food limited seating washroom on main floor) (brunch, lunch, and late-night snacks) Bio-degradable packaging Brunch available Sundays Gluten-free, vegan, and vegetarian options Vegetarian Options available available

Harvest Kitchen 124 Harbord St 13 minute walk from CDTPS (1.1km) Not wheelchair accessible Canadian comfort food Gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, and organic options available

Pubs & Bars

O’Grady’s Sin and Redemption 171 College 136 McCaul St 3 minute walk from CDTPS (240m) 10 minute walk from CDTPS (800m) Not wheelchair accessible Not wheelchair accessible Irish Pub Belgian bistro specializing in European beers Vegetarian options available Vegetarian options available

Red Room 444 Spadina Ave The Fortunate Fox 5 minute walk from CDTPS (400m) 280 Bloor Street West Wheelchair accessible 14 minute walk from CDTPS (1.2km) Relaxed bar with budget-friendly lunch and dinner options Wheelchair accessible Gluten-free, vegan, and vegetarian options available English style pub Vegetarian options available

VISITING TORONTO

We recommend downloading the Access Now app for smartphones – an interactive searchable map of local businesses with user ratings of their accessibility: http://accessnow.me/

Popular Attractions The CN Tower http://www.cntower.ca/intro.html

ROM – Royal Ontario Museum http://www.rom.on.ca/en

AGO – Art Gallery of Ontario https://ago.ca

The Distillery District http://www.thedistillerydistrict.com

Casa Loma http://www.casaloma.ca

Kensington Market http://www.kensington-market.ca/Default.asp?id=home&l=1

St. Lawrence Market http://www.stlawrencemarket.com

Ontario Science Centre https://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca 24

Bata Shoe Museum http://www.batashoemuseum.ca

Aga Khan Museum https://www.agakhanmuseum.org

High Park http://www.highparktoronto.com/

Toronto Island https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/parks-gardens-beaches/toronto-island-park/

Theatres Buddies in Bad Times http://www.buddiesinbadtimes.com

Canadian Stage http://www.canadianstage.com

Crow’s Theatre https://www.crowstheatre.com

Factory Theatre https://www.factorytheatre.ca

Harbourfront Centre http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com

Mirvish https://www.mirvish.com

Soulpepper https://www.soulpepper.ca

Tarragon Theatre http://www.tarragontheatre.com

The Theatre Centre http://theatrecentre.org

Theatre Passe Muraille http://www.passemuraille.ca

Parking http://map.utoronto.ca/access/parking-lots

Accessibility Resources https://www.handiscover.com/content/destinations/canada/guide-to-accessible-holiday-toronto-disabled-holidays/ http://wheelchairtraveling.com/accessible-attractions-and-sites-in-toronto-canada-for-wheelchairs-and-seniors/

SCHEDULE-IN-BRIEF

DAY 1: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2020

3:00PM – 7:30PM Robert Gill Theatre Lobby (214 College Street): REGISTRATION AND COFFEE 3:00PM – 5:00PM Walden Room (79 St. George Street): COFFEE

3:00PM – 4:30PM Paper Panel: Alexandra Bischoff, Alexandra Simpson (Seminar Room) “FIGURATIONS: AESTHETICS OF THE FEMININE BODY AS CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL MEDIUM”

3:00PM – 4:30PM Participatory Presentation/Workshop: Dr. Jill Carter (Leonard Common Room in Morrison Hall) “ON THE EDGE OF ENCOUNTER”

3:30PM – 4:30PM Performance: Tyler Cunningham, Julie Zhu, and the PROMPTUS Collective (Front and Long Rooms) “CHEER PIECE”

3:30PM – 5:00PM Paper Panel: Gerrit Krueper, Amanda Baker, Ryan Borochovitz (Robert Gill Theatre) “HORIZONS: ANIMACY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND CYBORG EMBODIMENT”

5:00PM – 5:30PM BREAK

5:30PM – 6:00PM OPENING REMARKS from the FOOT 2020 Team (Robert Gill Theatre) 6:00PM – 7:30PM KEYNOTE LECTURE: Dr. Rebecca Schneider, Brown University (Robert Gill Theatre) 7:30PM – 8:00PM EVENING RECEPTION (Robert Gill Theatre Lobby)

DAY 2: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2020

11:00AM – 5:30PM Robert Gill Theatre Lobby (214 College Street): REGISTRATION AND COFFEE 2:00PM – 3:30PM Front and Long Rooms (79 St. George Street): COFFEE

11:00AM – 1:00PM Paper Panel: Ian Huffam, Emma Pauly, Myrto Koumarianos (Walden, Front, and Long Rooms) “ECHOES: THE SOUND OF GENDERED EXPRESSION IN ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY GREEK TEXTUALITY”

11:30AM – 12:30PM Paper/Performance: Tony Nardi (Robert Gill Theatre) “WHEN LOOKING (AND/OR SPEAKING) WHITE IS NOT ENOUGH AND NEVER THE POINT: BODIES, IDENTITIES, AND TONGUES IN FLUX, TEMPORALLY, AND ‘IN’ (OFTEN HOSTILE) SPACE(S)”

11:30AM – 12:30PM Performance: Louis Pino and Karen Quinto (Seminar Room) “POST COMPUTER”

1:00PM – 2:00PM LUNCH

Participatory Presentation/Workshop: Anna Paliy (Leonard Common Room in Morrison Hall) 2:00PM – 3:00PM “MAKING GADGETS DANCE: FINDING PERSONAL NARRATIVES THROUGH CIRCUS APPARATUS”

Paper Panel: Gerardo Betancourt, Robert Motum, Debleena Tripathi (Seminar Room) 2:00PM – 3:30PM “SURROUNDINGS: BORDERED BODIES IN-PROGRESS AND IN-TRANSIT”

2:00PM – 3:30PM Performance: Dr. Dave Wilson and The Parahumans (Robert Gill Theatre) “REVISIONING HISTORICAL DANCE THROUGH POST-CONTEMPORARY DANCE (TWO SOLOS)”

2:00PM – 3:30PM Paper Panel: Ghinwa Yassine, Rohan Kulkarni, Julija Pesic (Walden Room) “(RE)MEMBERING(S): CONSTRUCTING DIASPORIC BODIES THROUGH TIME/TRAVEL/MEMORY” 28

2:30PM – 4:30PM Performance/Paper Panel: Luana Valentim, Dr. Christina Streva, Julia Matias (Performance Studio) “REVELATIONS: SITUATING SELFHOOD USING COSTUME, CABARET, AND COSPLAY”

3:30PM – 4:30PM Paper Panel: Sarah Robbins, Jeff Gagnon (Seminar Room) “OCCUPATIONS: POSITIONING THE ETHICS AND PEDAGOGIES OF POLITICAL PHYSICALITY”

3:30PM – 4:30PM Paper Panel: Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller, Keira Mayo (Walden Room) “REPETITIONS: CONNECTIONS IN GESTURE, LANGUAGE, IMPROVISATION, AND RESOLUTION”

3:30PM – 4:30PM Participatory Presentation/Workshop: Sanja Vodovnik, Nina Czegledy, Jimena Garcia Alvarez Buylla (Leonard Common Room in Morrison Hall) “EMBODIED SCIENCE FICTION: PROTOTYPING FUTURES”

4:00PM – 5:00PM Performance: Colin Tucker (Robert Gill Theatre) “EMBODYING DOCUMENTATION”

4:00PM – 5:30PM FEATURED EVENT: Institute for Dance Studies and The Dance Current (Front and Long Rooms) Panel and Magazine Launch: “LOST IN TRANSLATION: PUNK, WHACK, WAACKING, W(H)ACKING?”

5:30PM – 7:00PM FEATURED FACULTY LECTURE: Dr. Terry Robinson, University of Toronto (Robert Gill Theatre) “SPATIALITY AND THE ACTOR’S BODY: MANIFESTING THE FOURTH WALL, AN HISTORICAL CASE STUDY”

7:00PM – 7:30PM CLOSING REMARKS from the FOOT 2020 Team: “Best FOOT Forward” (Robert Gill Theatre)

8:00PM – 9:15PM SPECIAL INVITATION, PLAY VIEWING: Tarragon Theatre, The Runner (30 Bridgman Ave)* 9:30PM – 10:00PM SPECIAL INVITATION, ARTIST TALKBACK: Tarragon Theatre, The Runner (30 Bridgman Ave)*

*TICKETS FOR TARRAGON THEATRE’S PREVIEW PERFORMANCES OF THE RUNNER ARE AVAILABLE FOR A SPECIAL DISCOUNT TO ALL FOOT 2020 ATTENDEES BETWEEN FEBRUARY 27-MARCH 1. BOOK EARLY, AS THEY FILL UP QUICKLY! Coupon Code: FOOT2020 Discount: 20% off any priced ticket When buying tickets online the Coupon Code can be entered on the third page at the bottom right below the Checkout & Pay button. If you encounter any issues, call or e-mail Tarragon Theatre’s Patron Services department at 416-531-1827 or [email protected]

THE RUNNER by Christopher Morris directed by Daniel Brooks Feb 25 – Mar 29, 2020 in the Mainspace Opens Wednesday, March 4, 2020

“That’s all that matters. Kindness. An act of kindness.”

Z.A.K.A is an Orthodox Jewish volunteer force in Israel. They collect the remains of Jews killed in accidents. When Jacob, a Z.A.K.A volunteer, makes the split-second decision to treat a young woman, instead of the soldier she may have killed, his world is changed forever.

A powerful thriller from Toronto’s Human Cargo and winner of the 2019 Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding Production, Outstanding Direction and Outstanding New Play.

LINK: http://www.tarragontheatre.com/show/the-runner/

Many thanks to Tarragon Theatre for their generosity to our attendees! 30

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS KEYNOTE LECTURE DR. REBECCA SCHNEIDER (BROWN UNIVERSITY)

We are thrilled to announce that our keynote speaker at BODIES IN FLUX: FOOT 2020 is Dr. Rebecca Schneider from Brown University! We look forward to welcoming Dr. Schneider to our department.

BIO: Rebecca Schneider, Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, teaches performance studies, theater history, and theories of intermedia. She is the author of Remain (Meson Press, 2018 with Jussi Parikka); Theatre & History (Palgrave 2014), Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge 2011); and The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997). She is the winner of the 2019 Oscar Brockett Prize for Best Essay from the American Society of Theatre Research for her 2018 essay “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up” in Theatre Journal. She has coedited the anthology Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to 20th-Century Directing and three special issues of TDR: The Drama Review: 1. on Precarity and Performance (2012), 2. on New Materialisms and Performance (2015), and 3. on Performance and Social Reproduction (2018). She is a consortium editor for TDR, contributing editor to Women and Theatre, coeditor with David Krasner and Harvey Young of the book series “Theatre: Theory/Text/Performance” with University of Michigan Press. Schneider has published essays in Theatre Jounral, TDR, Representations, and Women and Performance as well as several anthologies, including Psychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out: Feminist Performance, Performance and Cultural Politics, Performance Cosmologies, Performance and the City, and the essay “Solo Solo Solo” in After Criticism. In addition, she has collaborated with artists at such sites as the British Museum in London and the Mobile Academy in Berlin, and delivered lectures at museums such as the Guggenheim in New York, the Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Centre de la Danse in Paris, and the Point Art Center in Cyprus.

Visit Dr. Schneider’s full profile here: https://vivo.brown.edu/display/rcschnei Please register for the conference using our Registration Form to attend Dr. Schneider’s lecture on Thursday, February 27, 2020 at 6:00PM. 31

FEATURED PANEL & MAGAZINE LAUNCH THE INSTITUTE FOR DANCE STUDIES + THE DANCE CURRENT

The 28th annual Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) conference at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Bodies in Flux, in collaboration with the Institute for Dance Studies and the Dance Current Magazine, is thrilled to host the panel “Lost in Translation: punk, whack, waacking, w(h)acking?”.

Now a popular dance practice, Punk/Whack originated in queer communities in Los Angeles. As the form spread, what's been lost in translation? How has it shapeshifted to fit into a changing world? This panel explores who the form was created for and who is claiming it now by asking “how does the whacking community in Toronto care for the queer history and bodies that we imitate and adapt?"

Organizer: Elif Işıközlü Moderator: Dr. Seika Boye Panelists: Ashley Perez, Emily Law, Kelvin Bacardii

Light refreshments will be provided!

Visit The Institute for Dance Studies here: https://www.dancestudiesuoft.ca/

Visit The Dance Current, Canada’s Dance Magazine here: https://www.thedancecurrent.com/

Please register for the conference using our Registration Form to attend this event on Friday, February 28, 2020 at 4:00PM.

FEATURED FACULTY LECTURE DR. TERRY F. ROBINSON (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, DRAMA & ENGLISH)

We are very excited to invite our very own Dr. Terry F. Robinson as a special guest to BODIES IN FLUX: FOOT 2020 to present a lecture on her research entitled “SPATIALITY AND THE ACTOR’S BODY: MANIFESTING THE FOURTH WALL, AN HISTORICAL CASE STUDY”.

Terry F. Robinson's research explores how the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century fashioned the body (socially, politically, sartorially, aesthetically) and interpreted the body’s forms and expressions. She is drawn to literary and visual representations of the body; to sites of enactment such as the theatre; to the ways in which artistic, cultural, and economic shifts shaped how people perceived bodies and communicated meaning; and to the kinetic movement of bodies in space. She is editor of Mary Robinson's 1794 drama Nobody (Romantic Circles) and co-editor of Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1860 (Cambridge Scholars). Her articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth- Century Life, European Romantic Review, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, BRANCH, and Oxford Handbooks Online, among others. Her current book project, Reading the Passions: Form, Feeling, and Expressive Truth in the Age of the Actor, 1750-1830 examines Romantic-era performance in light of eighteenth-century histrionic theory and practice. She is also currently at work on an edition of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal for Broadview Press, and a volume of collected essays entitled The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre for the University of Michigan Press.

Visit Dr. Robinson’s full profile here: https://www.cdtps.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/terry-f-robinson Please register for the conference using our Registration Form to attend Dr. Robinson’s lecture on Friday, February 28, at 5:30PM.

FULL SCHEDULE

DAY 1: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2020

3:00PM – 7:30PM Robert Gill Theatre Lobby (214 College Street): REGISTRATION AND COFFEE This is the main registration station. This is where you will receive your name tag.

3:00PM – 5:00PM Walden Room (79 St. George Street): COFFEE Come say hello and caffeinate before or after attending a session. To sign-in and receive your name tag, visit the main registration station at 214 College Street.

3:00PM – 4:30PM PAPER PANEL THEME: Figurations – Aesthetics of The Feminine Body as Cultural and Historical Medium LOCATION: Seminar Room MODERATOR: Keira Mayo

PRESENTER 1: Alexandra Bischoff PRESENTATION TITLE: Refiguring the Model: A Feminist Reframing of Her Historical Labours

ABSTRACT: [In this essay], the artist discusses the possibility of viewing the figure model as the original performance artist. After all, duration is the model's substrate and the body is her medium. While the painting or sculpture that depicts the model is evidence of an artist’s labour and skill set, Bischoff proposes that these objects can also stand

as documentation of the figure model’s durational performance.

In order to better understand the subjectivity of the figure model, the artist has begun to work as one. To reflect this embodied research, Bischoff's paper will not be recited in a traditional sense. Instead, a recording of the

34 text will be played while she takes a twenty minute pose—a standard duration for life drawing. In this way, the audience will be invited to reflect on her text and on her posture. This performance-lecture will work to position the figure model as a newfound art historical precedent to contemporary, durational performance art, and also to suggest a reevaluation of the labours of the typically anonymous model/muse.

BIO: Alexandra Bischoff (b. 1991, Treaty Six territory/Edmonton) is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based performance artist and writer. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and is a current MFA candidate at Concordia University in the department of Intermedia: Video, Performance, and Electronic Arts. She has performed and exhibited across Canada and internationally. Bischoff's art practice responds to subtle intimacies: architectural idiosyncrasies, pornographic slippages, relationships with strangers, and the like. Often, she focuses through the amorphous lens of women’s work. Sexual, emotional, and care-taking labours—legitimized or not, compensated or not—are some of the artist's main concerns. Archival and embodied research are some of her catalysts for making. Through durational performance, Bischoff aims to sensitively exercise the point at which leisure becomes labour and the sensual becomes unsettling.

PRESENTER 2: Sheetala Bhat (CANCELLED)

PRESENTATION TITLE: In-between Bodies: On Desire and Body in Girish Karnad's Hayavadana

ABSTRACT: In Girish Karnad's fantastical play Hayavadana, which is orginally from a collection of stories in Sanskrit called Kathasaritsagara, the protagonist Padmini tries to create a man she desires by putting together a head and a body each from two different people. This paper explores how Padmini's desire is located in the very act of transformation of the body. Padmini is in love with both the intellect of her husband and the physique of her husband's friend Devadatta. In the middle of the play both men kill themselves and Padmini "accidentally" exchanges their head and the body when a goddess gives her a power to give them life back. However, her experiment to create a perfect person with the head (an embodied form of intellect) and the body she loves fails, further complicating the relationship between body and desire. The play not only sees woman as an actively desiring subject in contrast to popular imagination of women as objects of desire, but also challenges the normative structures of desire. Drawing from Eve Sedgwick's work on free play of sexuality, this play explores how the protagonist resists institutionalized and gendered meaning of love and desire by desiring the body in transformation. This paper studies how theatre as

35 an embodied but transient medium, enables the articulation of desire as both the placeholder for transformation of the discourse of romantic love, as well as itself situated in and directed towards bodies in flux.

BIO: Sheetala Bhat is a theatre practitioner and writer from Karnataka, India. She has published a book on actresses in colonial India titled Performing Self, Performing Gender with Manipal University Press. She won the 2019 David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Sheetala is currently pursuing her doctoral studies in the department of English at the University of Western Ontario. She has worked with Chintana, a grassroots theatre company, exploring the possibilities of theatre in government schools in Karnataka. She has also been involved in Kannada-language street theatre, theatre workshops, feminist performance activism, and social journalism.

PRESENTER 3: Alexandra Simpson PRESENTATION TITLE: The Feminine and the Feline: A Case for Multispecies Activism

ABSTRACT: For centuries, the feminine body has been connected in various ways to the feline body including magic, law, culture, sexuality, and most recently mainstream activism. A reexamination of the cultural and political implications of this interspecies pairing – whether forced upon the individual cat or female, or willingly sought out through stories of co-habitation and companionship – feels particularly important given the popularity of the

Pussyhat as a symbol for the modern-day feminist. The medieval witch offers a starting point for this exploration, during which female witches were thought to transform into cats. To this day, the bewitched cat woman emerges through icons in popular culture including Cat Woman, Crazy Cat Lady, sexy Halloween costumes and most recently, the Pussyhat Activist. How have these bodies created a feminism that is simultaneously liberatory, restrictive as well as exclusionary to different groups of feminine bodies? Performance artists Karen Finley, Carolee Schneeman, and my own performance work ‘The Cativist’; a feline-femme hybrid that seeks to give rise to a multispecies activism, rely upon the use of a hybrid body to call upon these shared histories between the cat and the feminine, and asks audiences to reconsider the feminine body in this light. This paper examines notions of feminism through a performative and multispecies perspective clawing together medieval witches, feral cat colonies, interspecies love and Pussyhat activism offering a nuanced perspective into places of perceived domestication and wildness, and the hybrid body as a place of resistance.

BIO: Alexandra Simpson is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary theatre creator, mask builder and actor. She is the co- Artistic Leader of Animacy Theatre Collective (animacytheatrecollective.com). Alexandra has a BFA in Performance Acting and a MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University, and a MA in Performance and Environmental Studies from University of Toronto. She is a PhD Student at York University in Environmental Studies researching

embodied resistance in the anti-fossil fuel movement in Canada.

3:00PM – 4:30PM PARTICIPATORY PANEL/WORKSHOP TITLE: On The Edge of Encounter LOCATION: Leonard Common Room in Morrison Hall ORGANIZER AND MODERATOR: Dr. Jill Carter

ABSTRACT: The stories we tell can lift our neighbors up, or they can silence, denigrate and destroy. The stories we tell can open up spaces of fruitful encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, or they can engender disaffection, distrust, and disengagement. Encounters at the “Edge of the Woods” concerns itself with the shared duty of all Canadians (settlers, immigrants, refugees, permanent residents across ethnicities)” to listen, to learn, to

articulate intention, and to realize that intention through action. It envisions a way forward, which begins with a series of encounters, placing Indigenous bodies into intimate engagement with the lands and lifeforms stewarded for millennia by Indigenous bodies; non-Indigenous bodies into like engagement; and the bodies of witnesses into engagement with those of the witnessed. From within a flexible weave of Indigenous processual models and land-based encounters the Collective Encounter explored the curation of fluid spaces (in rehearsal and in performance) in which Indigenous participants and our non-Indigenous allies might address ourselves to the question of what it means “to rebel against the

permanence of settler colonial reality,” to “dream alternative realities,” and finally through story-ing together to

create both the “context and event” (Simpson “Land” 8- 9) out of which a process of re-worlding might begin. Within such spaces, we hope, storyteller and witness might re-imagine a way of doing life that honors the treaty- relationships into which we have been born or (in the case of new Canadians) “adopted.” For FOOT2020, several Collective Encounter members (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) propose to team with scholar-artists (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) who have witnessed the work to reflect upon the process of the show’s creation, on the experience of the artist-participants, and on the affect of this work upon its witnesses.

The session will unfold in four segments: (1) a 30-minute presentation that outlines artists’ objectives and the multiple processes at play in the creation of Encounters at the Edge of the Woods; (2) 30 minutes of “Witness Testimony” offered by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholar-artists who witnessed the show. What was their experience of Encounters? Are there commonalities of experience? Does the experience still sit in their bodies? Where?

(3) A 45-minute workshop that solicits embodied participation from all panelists and attendees. Within this workshop, we will explore the application of Metis curator David Garneau’s concept of “irreconcilable space” to ancient “Edge of the Woods” protocols; (4) A short period (15 minutes) of shared reflection and discussion.

This is a presentation by members of the JHI Sponsored Working Group "Native Performance Culture and the Rhythm of (Re) Conciliation: Remembering Ourselves in Deep Time."

Along with Dr. Jill Carter, presenters include: Sherry Bie, Antje Budde, Morgan Johnson, Trina Moyan, Karyn Recollet, Sheilah Salvador, and Gabriele Simmons.

PRESENTER BIOS: Sherry Bie, unsettling settler Canadian doctoral student at U of T (OISE) is researching contemporary models of theatre training for a diverse performance ecology with a focus on performing reconciliation. For four years Sherry has been a member of Dr. Jill Carter’s University of Toronto working group: Native Performance Culture and the

Rhythm of Re Conciliation: Re-membering ourselves in Deep Time, a collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artist/scholars looking at theatre and (re)conciliation. She is currently member of Dr. Jennifer Brant’s Graduate Assistant research team, bringing her oral performance practice to the emergent conversation between us. Sherry received her MA in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University (Toronto) in 2014. From 2001 to 2012 Bie was the Artistic Director of the English Section of the National Theatre School of Canada (NTS) in Montreal having herself been a student of founding NTS AD Powys Thomas at the Vancouver Playhouse Acting School. Bie performed on stages across Canada and abroad including the National Arts Centre, Canadian Stage, The Vancouver Playhouse, and the Centaur Theatre in Montreal, originating roles in plays by Canadian playwrights Morris Panych, Betty Lambert, 38

Peter Anderson, and David French. She was a company member at Caravan Farm Theatre and Theatre Beyond Words and played in the Odin Teatret's Ur Hamlet at Denmark's Elsinore Castle. Sherry Bie was the initial recipient of the Ray Michal Award for Outstanding Direction by an Emerging Director.

Antje Budde is an East-German conceptual, queer-feminist, interdisciplinary experimental scholar-artist and an Associate Professor of Applied Theatre Sciences, Cultural Communication and Modern Chinese Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. Antje has produced multi-disciplinary artistic research-creations in Germany, China and Canada working with a number of experimental creative collectives that she co-founded over the last two decades. Currently she develops new projects with her Digital Dramaturgy Lab_squared. Over the last three years Antje had the great privilege to engage, learn and connect with Jill Carter’s working group “Native Performance Culture and the Rhythm of (Re)conciliation: Re-Membering Ourselves in Deep Time” as well as Jill’s SSHRC-funded project “Research as restitution and redress: the Great Lakes Canoe Journey and the transmission of Anishinaabewin through deep time”. Apart from deep time, Antje also thinks about deep space, deep learning and the labor of survival/togetherness.

Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) is a theatre practitioner and researcher, currently cross appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies; the Transitional Year Programme; and Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. She works with many members of Tkaron:to’s Indigenous theatre community to support the development of new works and to disseminate artistic objectives, process, and outcomes through community-driven research projects. Her scholarly research, creative projects, and activism are built upon ongoing relationships with Indigenous Elders, Artists and Activists, positioning her as witness to, participant in, and disseminator of oral histories that speak to the application of Indigenous aesthetic principles and traditional knowledge systems to contemporary performance. Jill also works as a researcher and tour guide with First Story Toronto; facilitates Land Acknowledgement, Devising, and Land-based Dramaturgy Workshops for theatre makers in this city; and performs with the Talking Treaties Collective (Jumblies Theatre, Toronto). In September 2019, Jill directed Encounters at the Edge of the Woods. This was a devised show, featuring Indigenous and Settler voices, and it opened Hart House Theatre’s 100th season; it is the first instance of Indigenous presence on Hart House Theatre’s stage in its 100 years of existence as the cradle for Canadian theatre.

Morgan Johnson is a theatre creator, scholar and activist. A settler currently living in Tkaronto, Morgan is a doctoral student at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies whose research focuses on physical theatre creation that is centred on social and environmental justice. She is also an actor/creator in Toronto and Co-Artistic Director of Animacy Theatre Collective (animacytheatrecollective.com). Morgan holds a BFA in Acting from the University of

Windsor and a Masters in Environmental Studies from York University.

Trina Moyan is a nehiyaw iskwew (Plains Cree) from the Frog Lake First Nation in Northern Alberta. She has devoted her life’s work to the advancement of Indigenous peoples through her more than 20-year career as writer/producer, business owner, community activist and performer. She has produced numerous productions for the CBC and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Trina is the co-owner of Bell & Bernard Limited, a consulting firm specializing in the duty to consult law while representing Indigenous communities engaged in cultural and economic developments. Her consultation work currently includes working with the Toronto Public Library, LGA Architectural

Partners, Plant Architects, and the townships of New Market and Whitby. Trina also serves as a guide for First Story, presenting the Indigenous history of Tkaronto; is a core member of the Toronto Indigenous Business Association, working to establish an Indigenous neighbourhood district; is a member of the U of T’s re-conciliation Deep Time working group; and is an Encounters Collective performer. Her life’s work is inspired by her two sons and her mother Jeanne, a residential school survivor.

Karyn Recollet Ph.D. is an Assistant professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is an urban Cree scholar/ writer currently living in the Williams Treaty territory, and teaching in the Dish with One Spoon treaty territory. Recollet explores celestial land pedagogies as 'kinstillatory' in her work

- expressing an understanding of land pedagogy that exceeds the terrestrial. Recollet thinks alongside dance making practices, Hip hop, and visual/digital art as they relate to forms of Indigenous futurities and relational practices of being. Recollet co-writes with dance choreographers and artists engaged in other mediums to expand upon methodologies that consider land relationships and kinship making practices that are going to take us into the future.

Born in Manila, Philippines, Sheilah Madonna Salvador has been in Toronto for a few decades now. A writer and a poet, her work has been greatly affected and inspired by her Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Toronto. She plans to keep writing, learning and to do her masters in teaching because she believes that art, education and

knowledge sharing are powerful ways to honour her responsibilities as a treaty person, to heal and empower marginalized and underrepresented women of colour like herself.

3:30PM – 4:30PM PERFORMANCE TITLE: Cheer Piece LOCATION: Front and Long Rooms PRESENTERS: Tyler Cunningham with Julie Zhu PERFORMERS: The PROMPTUS Collective MODERATOR: Alisha Grech

ABSTRACT: Cheer Piece by Julie Zhu imagines a world in which every action, even those inconsequential, requires you to playing a pre-recorded cheer for yourself as emotional and auditory support. As such, the piece examines our current cultural obsession with self-validation and self-care through humor, empathy, and rigorous structure. Cheer

Piece was premiered in NYC by the PROMPTUS Collective in January 2019. The piece is open to any number of

performers, in any performing medium they choose. The piece is structured as a "round" of sorts: Zhu presents thirty systems of notated gestures, and each system represents one year. The oldest performer begins the piece, and as they move onto the next system, a year passes--eventually, the next oldest person will enter the performance in canon form. While this is meant to structurally mirror the passing of time in a lifetime, Zhu also asks the performer to imagine their interpretation of gesture as the age they "become". The result is the transformation (the "aging") of performing bodies over the course of the piece, asking the performers to revisit past versions of themselves through

the performing process. I am proposing to mount Cheer Piece for the FOOT 2020 Conference as a collaboration between students from the Faculty of Music & CDTPS; having performed the piece myself, the post(or, trans)disciplinary approach to performance Zhu's piece engages with undermines traditional views of the body in musical performance (especially, relative to that of theatre). As Professor Nikki Cesare Schotzko aptly notes on musical performance: "[t]hough it is the sound that disappears, it is the body that is ultimately not seen" (Cesare Schotzko, "'Like a chained man's bruise': The Mediated Body in Eight Songs for a Mad King and Anatomy Theater",

437). I am also proposing, if it's possible, a post-performance talk with Zhu and/or performers from the PROMPTUS

Collective that gave its premiere (whom worked closely with Zhu to realize the piece) via online conference that I will moderate. Cheer Piece examines the disembodied & mediated voice of the body onstage, the transforming of the

body via performance process, and the power dynamics of the "cheer"; inviting the audience into these themes might allow for a fuller reading of Zhu's work. If this is not possible, I would like to propose a brief talk post-performance of some of the central ideas driving the work.

PRESENTER BIO: A native of the D.C. Metro Area, Tyler Cunningham is a Toronto based performer, percussionist, & electronic artist who is fiercely passionate about new music and the creation of inter-/trans-disciplinary art. He has

performed across the US and abroad in Europe and Asia, and has premiered over fifty solo and chamber works. Tyler’s performance practice and research incorporates theater and dramaturgy into concert music, and how musical spheres can be developed by considering the ocular. An advocate for new music, Tyler led a commissioning project in 2017 titled inquiry before snow, creating of five world premieres inspired by works of poetry. He is the co-founder of the PROMPTUS Collective, an NYC group of performers dedicated to researching a trans-disciplinary practice. In past summers, Tyler has performed with Evolution Ensemble at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, as a

Contemporary Ensemble fellow at the Atlantic Music Festival, and in the Contemporary Performance Institute at the

Composer’s Conference. He holds a Bachelors of Music from the Juilliard School and is pursuing his Masters of Music at the University of Toronto, studying with Aiyun Huang.

3:30PM – 5:00PM PAPER PANEL THEME: Horizons – Animacy, Artificial Intelligence, and Cyborg Embodiment LOCATION: Robert Gill Theatre MODERATOR: Sanja Vodovnik

PRESENTER 1: Gerrit Krueper PRESENTATION TITLE: Performing on Virtual Stages: Liberating the Species-Being in Cognitive Capital

ABSTRACT: To become human, one must become cyborg. As contradictory in nature this statement appears to be, this paper will unlock the inherent logic in the illogic using the Marxist species-being, grounded on the notions of universality and existence as a free being. This paper presents an understanding of the actions of human and being

42 human in material historical terms in relation to performance across a variety of platforms with internet performance art at its center. Though the aim of this paper is to present a theoretical exploration, to illustrate key components and aspects of debate, I will use an example of performance art by the artist Joseph DeLappe, who, to counter-act against the military propaganda of the video game America’s Army, logged into the game with the user name Dead-in-Iraq and by manually typing in name and information of actual dead soldiers confronts the players with the gruesome reality of war in an abstracting game environment. I hope to demonstrate how medium-specific notions of performance can be reframed, theoretically, to bridge otherwise competing understandings of the cyborg body and the species-being concepts. Through the reading of online performance, this paper creates a theoretical conceptualization of both the cyborg body and Marx’ species-being concept, bringing forth a renewed interpretation of Marx’ capital critique. Methodologically, this will be achieved through dialogue between old notions of Marx with contemporary capital theories by such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Donna Haraway- extending with the species-being.

The machine has become a part of the laborer, the extension of their body. As the machine continues to consume vital parts of the human thus translating the human body into a literal instrument of labor and maintenance, the exploitability of the laborer’s life is increased. However, with the transfers of skill and strength the body’s capabilities also become extended. In essence, the material reality of the cyber-body becomes an ambivalent one: a reality of exploitation and abstraction, designed to eventually create a fixed labor of indefinite capital accumulation, as well as a revelation of potentials of liberation (by mastering one’s cyborg body and re-appropriate it to create a ‘connection’ of universality). Put together, this ambivalence recovers the real species-being.

The example of praxis provided portrays such inherent ambivalence of the cyborg body: a video game that was created for military propaganda purposes is appropriated for de-mystifying performance art by bringing the names and dates of death of real-life soldiers into the fictional world. Players are momentarily made aware of the cruelty of war, stop playing the game, and take a glimpse at the inner truth of war – liberated from the glorification and abstraction of war by propaganda. In conclusion, the power of technology is inherently ambivalent; but it comes not without resistance; the reframed cyborg comprehends that, as Nick Dyer-Witheford concludes, “Labor can dispense with wage, and with capitalism, and find different ways to organize its own creative energies,” (Cyber-Marx, 68) finally becoming truly human.

BIO: Gerrit Krueper is a Marxist thinker who specializes his research on Autonomist Marxist, and Cyber-Marxist theory. His field of study incorporates Science Fiction Film, Japanese Popular Culture, Video games and Digital/Social Media. His main goal is to contribute to the theorization of resistance against capital, basing it primarily on capital's contemporary tools of exploitation: technology and the immaterial. His research constitutes of the proposal of a trans-/post-humanist theory of the cyborg, one that is both symbolic but also practical. A theory whose conceptualization reads the cyborg on the means of both the cyborg-body (production, tools of labor) and the cyber- brain, its immaterial realm (consciousness, species-being) – one heavily inspired and theorized by Japanese cyberpunk animation. He acquired his BA in American and German Studies at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, during which he also spent an exchange year at SUNY Albany in the USA, and his master's degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester in New York. As of right now, he is doing his PhD in Cinema and Media

Studies at the University of British Columbia.

PRESENTER 2: Amanda Baker

PRESENTATION TITLE: Can Robots Improvise?

ABSTRACT: Technology has been slowly seeping into every aspect of our daily lives, changing how we work, play, and communicate with each other. Automation has made things faster, cheaper, and easier, but has also come with its own set of difficulties, forcing humans to adjust and adapt to new ways of life. The pervasive widespread acceptance of technology and robotics as part of our day-to-day lives is both troubling and exciting when one thinks of the new avenues of exploration at our disposal, particularly in the area of theatre. Technological advancements have been ever-present in the world of theatre production, from advancements with lighting fixtures, to innovation in set design and sound production, to name a few. What’s interesting to note though is how technology has morphed from acting as a way to enhance the theatre experience, to technology acting on stage itself through the use of robots.

In this paper my core focus is on the question “Can robots improvise?” I begin by exploring the history of robot bodies on stage, beginning with human actors portraying the first incarnation of robots in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) to the first modern day example of true robot acting in Elizabeth Meriwether’s Heddatron. Next, I look at three core examples of robot improvisation: Dr. Karl Wurst’s I Comici Roboti, Lego robots remotely controlled by a “director” trained to perform specific Commedia dell’Arte lazzi, Dr. David Saltz’s Commedia Robotica, Commedia dell’Arte performed with the DARwIn-OP robot Zeeb Zob, and Kory Mathewson and Piotr

Mirowski’s Artificial Language Experiment (A.L.Ex) system, a chatbot style robot trained by neural networks to perform improv comedy. These robots exhibit the range of improvisational robotic research occurring, from solely movement-based with the I Comici Roboti robots, to purely speech-based with the A.L.Ex system, and then Zeeb Zob working with a hybrid model of both speech and movement. All are examples of the strides being taken to push the envelope when it comes to robot improvisation, and the work being done to explore the fundamental question of whether robots can indeed perform improvisation. I posit that, though contributing to the continued research in this area, only basic improvisational aspects have been completed successfully thus far with any of the three projects. Though improvisational actions have been successfully mimicked in the robots, none yet possess a true level of intelligence or agency on a level comparable to a human improv actor. I make use of Gunter Lösel’s methodological framework outlined in his paper “Can Robots Improvise?” to delve into these three case studies, examining their improvisational abilities, and providing insight on the current state and the projected future of these works.

BIO: Amanda Baker is a recent Master’s graduate from University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and

Performance Studies, and a graduate from Queen’s University’s Computing and the Creative Arts program. Her primary research interest lies in the intersections of technology and theatre, and the gamification of theatrical experiences through immersive and interactive theatre productions. As a practitioner, Amanda’s field of interest is in the world producing and production management, having worked with companies including Single Thread Theatre, Colliding Scopes Theatre, and Volcano Theatre. She is currently working in quality assurance as a member of the development team for the Cohort Project, a coding framework freely accessible to artists administered by Adelheid

Dance Projects.

PRESENTER 3: Ryan Borochovitz

PRESENTATION TITLE: Animality and Puppetry in the Meta-Narrative of National Theatre's War Horse

ABSTRACT: Pertaining to the mechanization of the animal body in the popular stage adaptation of War Horse – as orchestrated by London’s National Theatre and Handspring Puppet Company – this paper explores the production’s unique juncture of animal theory and puppet aesthetics. It begins with a cursory discussion of the process of adapting Michael Morpurgo’s novel, in translating the eponymous Joey from words on a page – focalized through the first-

person perspective of the horse himself – into a fully operational mechanical puppet. From there, special methodological attention is paid to the theatrical paratexts which have surrounded the production, which includes promotional materials produced by National Theatre as well as media reception of the final performance. It examines how the technical achievement of the puppet has dominated the production’s meta-narrative, as perpetuated by this

paratextual body, has eclipsed any of the narrative and thematic elements inherent to the play itself. For points of comparison, this will be examined alongside the paratexts of two logically similar case studies: 1) Spielberg’s 2011 film adaptation of the same source material, whose distinctly cinematic use of real horses made hardly the same impression on audience’s as the theatrical version; 2) Peter Shaffer’s Equus (with a brief word on Lumet’s 1977 film adaptation) being among the more notable stage representations of horses, famously characterized by its Brechtian simplicity.

BIO: Ryan Borochovitz is a first-year PhD student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. He

holds a BA with Specialized Honours in Theatre Studies from York University, and an MA in Theatre Theory and

Dramaturgy from the University of Ottawa. His primary research interests include autobiographical drama, narratology, and theories of fictionality in theatre.

5:00PM – 5:30PM BREAK

5:30PM – 6:00PM OPENING REMARKS from the FOOT 2020 Team (Robert Gill Theatre)

6:00PM – 7:30PM KEYNOTE LECTURE: Dr. Rebecca Schneider, Brown University (Robert Gill Theatre)

KEYNOTE INTRODUCTION BY: The FOOT 2020 Team

7:30PM – 8:00PM EVENING RECEPTION (Robert Gill Theatre Lobby)

DAY 2: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2020

11:00AM – 5:30PM Robert Gill Theatre Lobby (214 College Street): REGISTRATION AND COFFEE This is the main registration station. This is where you will receive your name tag.

2:00PM – 3:30PM Front and Long Rooms (79 St. George Street): COFFEE Come say hello and caffeinate before or after attending a session. To sign-in and receive your name tag, visit the main registration station at 214 College Street.

11:00AM – 1:00PM PAPER PANEL FOLLOWED BY INVITATION TO JOIN PARTICIPATORY COMPONENT THEME: Echoes – The Sound of Gendered Expression in Ancient and Contemporary Greek Textuality LOCATION: Walden, Front, and Long Rooms MODERATOR: Robert Motum

PRESENTER 1: Ian Huffam PRESENTATION TITLE: The Body of Text and the Body-Based Text in Jillian Keiley’s Bakkhai

ABSTRACT: This paper explores three instances in the staging of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s 2017 production of Euripides’ Bakkhai where director Jillian Keiley radically departed from the classical staging conventions of Greek tragedy, instead choosing to focus on the presentation of the performers’ bodies to add implicit modern commentary

not found in the text. In this production, the chorus of maenads kiss and fondle each other in their Bacchic stupor, Agaue

frees herself from her strappy heels and tight-fitting dress in order to join the female revels only to be later forced to re-join sober society by donning a similar outfit, and the arrogant conservative king Pentheus makes his transformation from business suit-wearing politician to female impersonator onstage while Dionysus’ wandering hands provide a psychosexual element to the scene. Rather than criticizing these choices, this paper explores whether or not these directorial choices have any effect on the body of the play’s text as they occur without any dialogue, reflects on how these modern choices in comparison to their counterparts in ancient staging conventions demonstrate key differences 47 between modern and ancient conceptions of theatrical “liveness” and the primacy of the dramatic text, and concludes by considering this production in the context of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of post-dramatic shift, wherein theatrical elements external to the dramatic text require the same focus and analysis as would the text.

BIO: Ian Huffam is a recent MA graduate from the University of Ottawa’s Department of Theatre, where his thesis “Translating Aristotelian Lexis in Euripides’ Electra” included translating the entirety of that tragedy into modern English verse. Ian also spent several years covering regular season and festival theatre as a reviewer for the New Ottawa Critics, and has also been a jury member for Ottawa’s Prix Rideau Awards. He hopes to continue his studies into the performance history of Greek tragedy as well as theorizations of its modern production.

PRESENTER 2: Emma Pauly PRESENTATION TITLE: An Adornment for the God: Re-Centering the Queer Body of Dionysus in Bacchae

ABSTRACT: There has been a groundswell of theatrical adaptation over the past decade, a rapidly expanding canon of reinterpretations, revisions, re-imaginings of already-existing work. These efforts have, for the most part, striven to “update” stories thought outdated, patriarchal, or similarly out of step with modern life. In particular, Euripides’ Bacchae has received no end of reworking. The play has a dizzyingly varied production history, veering wildly from the infamously lurid Dionysus in ’69 to Caryl Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds (a series of temporally disconnected vignettes woven together by dance) to Charles Mee’s Bacchae 2.0, rituals to rock operas and everything in between. So much of the scholarship and performance history surrounding Bacchae has been focused on one body onstage: Pentheus, the repressed, wrathful King of Thebes, torn asunder on the slopes of Mount Kithairon by a horde of Maenads with his mother at their head. Pentheus’ head cradled in Agave’s arms is one of the most arresting stage pictures in the tragic canon and the scholarship around the gendered and dismembered body of the king has spanned centuries. In this paper I argue for a recentering of the other body at the center of this text, a body that has, for all its ties to change and transformation, stayed remarkably static throughout the centuries: the body of the god Dionysus. Despite being explicitly referred to in the text as “gymnomorphos”, “woman-shaped”, Dionysus has been overwhelmingly portrayed onstage by cisgender, slim-bodied, male-identifying individuals: Alan Cumming, Ben Whishaw, and Jonathan Groff to name a recent few. When directors deviate from this casting, the stage picture presented still manages to remain the same; SITI Company’s production at the Getty Villa in the summer of 2018 put forth Ellen Lauren as the god. Tall, slender

48 and wiry, Lauren’s deep voice and shoulder-length hair gave the impression of a divine Mick Jagger, a masc-presenting rockstar. Recentering the character of Dionysus also forces us, both practitioners and scholars, to confront the implications of the textual reality that the body presented on stage is a choice for the character of Dionysus as well as for the director. Dionysus has “μορφὴν δ᾽ ἀμείψας ἐκ θεοῦ βροτησίαν”, “swapped [his] divine form for a mortal one” (4).

The long-haired stranger the audience and characters see is an explicit fabrication, a costume that the God has chosen to wear. So why, when presented with the wide and varied spectrum of bodies in the world, is a character explicitly tied to flux restricted to such a small subset of representations? By recentering the discourse around Dionysus, it is possible to present a version of a classical text that needs no “updating” to be relevant to the modern day. By returning to the textual foundation for the theorization of this queer body--both of character and actor--it is possible to more expansively imagine androgyny and to configure a performance of the character who bears the epithet “One Who is Man and Woman” that lives up to that title.

BIO: Emma Pauly (she/her/hers or they/them/theirs) is a dramaturg, translator and performer with a focus in Greco-

Roman text, particularly tragedy. They hold a B.A. from the University of Chicago in Theater and Performance Studies with a minor in Classics and an M.A. from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s International Acting Programme. Their translations have been featured in productions at Chicago’s Prop Thtr (where she is a member of the dramaturg pool) and Pop Magic Productions, of selections from the Orphic Hymns and Ovid’s Metamorphoses respectively; their translation of Euripides' Bacchae has received several public readings and has most recently been published in The Mercurian, a journal dedicated to theatrical translation. She is currently serving as the Supporting Dramaturg and translation consultant on Court Theatre’s productions of the full Theban Cycle (with The Gospel at Colonus taking the place of Oedipus at Colonus), a three-show endeavor spanning two seasons. Originally hailing from Los Angeles, they are currently based in Chicago.

PRESENTER 3: Myrto Koumarianos PRESENTATION TITLE: In the rhythm of creativity: groove, flow, contagion, and… prayerful performance?

ABSTRACT: In a few very special moments in rehearsal or performance, particularly in work with song, I have experienced the body's flux becoming harmonic—entering softly into a thrilling but calm alignment that feels purposeful, open, connected, full of gratitude and meaning. In this paper, I would like to think/feel through this rich potentiality of

49 the human body/being. I will bring together ideas from various disciplines—including the concepts of flow (psychology), communitas (anthropology), entrainment (cognitive science, biology, physics)—with my practical, theoretical (…embodied …in flux) questions around the possibility of offering (or receiving!) performance as prayer. I will share my questions and provisional answers (in flux, still-always in process) through detours in the bodies of memory, desire, doubt, and in the embodiment of song in my work with the Open Program (Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas

Richards) and in my own practice.

PERFORMANCE COMPONENT

TITLE: Intervention: An inter-bodied sonance (or) a letter from my grandmother

ABSTRACT: Bring what you remember. Leave behind what you'll forget. Might that be enough? There's a woman and a chorus (a chorus?). Whose words are these? Whose songs? What bodies of-dance-of-song-of-pain-of-memory-of- joy-and-of-desire? You're invited: lend us gently your inter-bodied sonance if you will. Gentle… (what is she singing for?)

BIO: Myrto Koumarianos is a doctoral candidate in a collaborative program at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Before theatre, she studied psychology and literature, gaining two undergraduate degrees from York University. Her doctoral research pertains to the work of the Open Program (Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards). Undertaking embodied research through an apprenticeship with them in Italy, the US, and Brazil, she came to question whether (and: how, when, where, why, on behalf of and with whom) performance can be (experienced or offered or received as) a prayer. Her research is supported by a number of awards, including a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, a SSHRC Connection Grant, and two JHI Program for the Arts Grants. Myrto recently designed and taught a course entitled: “Grotowski intersections: theory and practice of the actor's craft” and is currently building a singing practice with a small group in Toronto. She also writes poetry and has been entangled in all kinds of performance experiments on all sides of thestage since 2010, including with Ars Mechanica, the Ditch Witch Brigade, the Digital Dramaturgy Lab, the Toronto Theatre Laboratory, and others.

11:30AM – 12:30PM PAPER/PERFORMANCE TITLE: When Looking (And/Or Speaking) White is Not Enough and Never the Point: Bodies, Identities, and Tongues in Flux, Temporally, and ‘in’ (Often Hostile) Space(s) LOCATION: Robert Gill Theatre PERFORMERS/SPEAKERS: Tony Nardi and Dr. Anna Migliarsi (CANCELLED) MODERATOR: Giorelle Diokno

ABSTRACT: Academic-Artist Anna Migliarisi and Practitioner-PhD Candidate Tony Nardi confront and reflect on core issues of identity, race, speaking ‘white’, belonging, space and memory. Stanislavsky insisted that your essential self — bringing your own individual feelings to (to a role), endowing it with all the features of (your) own personality—matters. The Habima collective was founded to address the

comparative lack of a theatrical tradition in Jewish culture and the established representations of Jewish stereotypes in theatre. Master Acting Teacher Peter Kass (Boston U 1956-60) encouraged students to bring their cultural selves to their work. In the Canadian context, how have “diverse” bodies (in this case Italian-Canadians) moved their cultural selves through time and performative spaces when circumscribed by outsider notions of cultural types (e.g.“dumb wop,” “hot-blooded,” “swarthy”) etc. By what standards are these bodies defined? What are the merits and limits of outsidedness as a creative mode and path for performance?

Migliarisi and Nardi will confront the layers, intersections and persistence of these issues through the prism

of the 1990 A Modo Suo production, linking them to a wider discussion of the institutional challenges “diverse”

practitioners have faced since. Additionally, drawing on critical race theory, they will challenge a prominent Canadian scholar’s contention* that “diverse” practitioners today do not face the same institutional “resistance" that Migliarisi, Nardi et al. did in 1990, and that the reality had changed “a lot and for the better.”

* At the “Migration, Representation, Stereotypes Conference” at the University of Ottawa, April 28-30, 2017

PERFORMER BIOS: A multi-award winner in film/TV and theatre, Tony Nardi is a five-time Canadian screen awards Nominee; received the Prix Guy-L’Écuyer for Best Actor for the 16th Rendez-vous du cinéma Québécois (La Déroute (1998) and was nominated for the Quebec Cinema Awards (Le Gala Québec Cinema - Prix Iris) for Best Supporting Actor in 2016 and 2017. He has performed in theatres across Canada. His first play, La Storia dell’Emigrante, garnered the 1st James Buller Award for

Best Original Canadian play at the Ontario Multicultural Theatre Festival at Harbourfront. A Modo Suo (A Fable) received a 1990 Dora nomination (Outstanding New Play). In 2007, Two Letters, his theatrical monologues on the state of contemporary theatre, film/TV (and stereotypes) were nominated for a Dora Award (Outstanding New Play). He was nominated for a Siminovitch Prize (2008) in Theatre (playwriting).

Anna Migliarisi holds a BFA from the School of Dramatic Art, University of Windsor and an MA and PhD from the CDTPS, University of Toronto. She has published numerous articles and four books on directorial history and practice. In addition, she is an established member of the professional theatre and film community, and Professor of Theatre at

Acadia University.

12:00PM – 1:00PM PERFORMANCE TITLE: Post Computer

LOCATION: Seminar Room

PERFORMERS: Louis Pino and Karen Quinto

PRESENTER/MODERATOR: Caitlin Gowans

ABSTRACT: The prevailing theoretical milieu of the human race regarding life and death is that there is something beyond. A creator? Souls transcending or sometimes recreated into another body? Extraterrestrials and other

dimensions? Simultaneous realities?

Science is believed to ‘play God’, to prove and disprove theories and post-theories regarding the concept of the

origins of life that begot the creation of humans. And what of humans creating AI?

It is conceivable that the dawn of the internet was the origin of the Post-Computer Era. Single-celled

‘mechanical organisms’ connecting in an ethereal network like fungal mycelium encompassing the entirety of earth. The computer is no longer solely computing. It gathers information. It creates more information out of the previous iteration. Problem solving in the disembodied space until it evolved into Artificial Intelligence through the capacities and limitations of human technology and human fear. We will explore the depth at which point AI transcends into being alive and being human, all the while bound in its current physical manifestation, which is in constant state of flux. The work, “Post Computer”, questions the authenticity of the term ‘artificial’ and the humanity that could be ascribed to Artificial Intelligence if they transcend the creators that are wary of the implications regarding such transcendence. Are AIs human, and do they change the concept surrounding what it means to be human? The art performance piece combines percussion as narration, synergistically lending abstract sounds to convey the concepts being presented through the art. Each composed movement is a distinct layer of the inner life of the AI, existing through the versions and iterations the AI protagonist experiences. The use of visual projections and arduino enhances the physical and disembodied nature of the post-computer era.

PERFORMER BIOS: Louis Pino is a percussionist and composer based in Toronto. Pino studied at the Juilliard Pre-College, where he received the Commencement Award. His work spans musical genres, including composition and improvisation for instruments, electronics, and contemporary composed theater among others. Pino holds a degree in percussion and electronic composition from Oberlin Conservatory, where he studied percussion with Michael Rosen and electronics with Aurie Hsu and Joo Won Park, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Percussion Performance at the University of Toronto with Aiyun Huang.

Karen Quinto is a Toronto-based performance artist. Quinto studied at OCAD where she majored in sculpture and installation with focus on performance art. She is a Masters of Environmental Science graduate at the University of Toronto, a discipline that she merges with art to convey scientific concepts. Quinto has published in the International Journal of Molecular Science as an illustrator and as an Editorial Cartoonist and Illustrator for Nature Partner Journals.

She directed and performed the piece ‘Ghost in the Sky’ in collaboration with Febby Tan, a University of Toronto Master in Music Technology graduate. The production received software and technical consultancy from David Rokeby.

1:00PM – 2:00PM LUNCH (Robert Gill Theatre Lobby)

2:00PM – 3:00PM WORKSHOP TITLE: Making Gadgets Dance: Finding Personal Narratives Through Gymnastics/Circus Apparatus LOCATION: Leonard Common Room in Morrison Hall ORGANIZER/MODERATOR: Anna Paliy

ABSTRACT: In this 1-hour workshop, I would like to invite you to explore the following question: “What happens when an inanimate object becomes a temporary extension of a moving/dancing body”? Using a set of 10 exercises and a mixture of description and demonstration to instruct basic rhythmic gymnastics apparatus technique (with ball, rope, ribbon, hoop, and clubs) taken from the FIG Code of Points, I will guide an exploration of the creative possibilities which

can arise out of playfully merging our bodies with our material surroundings. Rather than dedicating my focus to the mechanics of the exercises (ex: how they ought to be done “by the rules”) I plan to ask participants for feedback about the various narrative moments they experience while navigating the fluctuations between bodily freedom and bodily control. We will try to make each respective apparatus an “extension of ourselves” in our own unique ways using each object’s specific properties (ex: the roundness of the ball, the weight of the clubs). Using our sense of personal embodiment (acknowledging both our amplitudes and limitations, flexible and tense spots, histories of

injury/pain/discomfort, etc.), we will set each apparatus in various motions and we will use the momentum of these

motions to allow the apparatus to “lead” the orientation of our bodies in directions which we may otherwise not have the opportunity to explore often. Think of this as personal body mapping: lean into the vast possibilities of going forward, sideways, backward, up, down, outward, inward, etc. Think of the body as an arrangement of a myriad geometrical planes; a budding geography; a map-in-progress; an adventure; a story. Notice the interplay each apparatus evokes between freedom and control, between planning and randomness, between process and destination. Respond to your apparatus, and to its relations with your surroundings. Let it take you from Point A to Point B. Follow it. Become a part

of it. Let it become a part of you. It may want to fall, roll, or bounce away: let it. Notice any frustrations which emerge when your apparatus misbehaves or acts unpredictably and let them pass. Retrieve the apparatus and continue. Imagine your apparatus as a new body part. Ebb and flow with it. Exist alongside it. The more you “listen” to it, the more it will “listen” to you.

PRESENTER BIO: Anna Paliy is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is also the Publications and Research Assistant in the Institute for Dance Studies. Her research explores cultural intersections in ballet costume reception between the years 1890-1930, with a focus on reading the storytelling potential of theatrical textile design. Her writing has been published in the journals

Kino and Semicolon (University of Western Ontario), Transverse (University of Toronto), and most recently The Dance Current and The WholeNote magazines. Formerly a provincially competitive rhythmic gymnast in Ukraine, France, and Canada, Anna now enjoys practicing circus acrobatics and painting in her spare time.

2:00PM – 3:30PM PAPER PANEL THEME: Surroundings – Bordered Bodies In-Progress and In-Transit LOCATION: Seminar Room MODERATOR: Sarah Robbins

PRESENTER 1: Gerardo Betancourt PRESENTATION TITLE: Global Speedos: Bodies as Source of LGTBQ Pride and Worldwide Visibility

ABSTRACT: Triggerfish was formed in 2001. It was the first queer club promoting the sport of water polo in the city of Toronto. Participants wear speedos that has been a modern tool for efficient swimming. Moreover, Triggerfish speedos have achieved three unintended goals. Firstly, by queering the space (swimming pool) in a safe way where the practices take place. Secondly, speedos exhibit the texture of the body setting them on display. Thirdly, members of the team have travelled across the globe, in a new turn of positive body image. In new ways of “gay gaze” (Rohrs, 2019) that empower, promote sports, and modern lives. The photos of people wearing the speedos are taken in different geographic locations, not necessarily by the sea or in water activities (Manhattan, Morocco, Acapulco, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Niagara Falls, Rome, Sydney, Stonehenge, London, the Great Wall, Copenhagen, etc.). The disruption of spaces that are not designed for aquatic activities contrast with the quasi-naked bodies that are worn with pride, promotes sportsmanship, and spreading queerness around the globe. Although the depiction of bodies presented some limitations in terms of participant’s gender and race, “Global Speedos” allows the visibility of formerly subjugated queer bodies. The Facebook page travels across time and place to tell an ignored narrative. It works to connect communities in casual conversations related to the liberation of LGTBQ individuals in Canada. The bodies’ performances are done in subtle 55 way observing the landscapes, from a witness perspective, and, allows visualization of hidden planning of bold acts of visibility in places that are not traditionally welcoming. Marginalized queer communities have gained political and social recognition using visibility as a point of departure. Wearing a Triggerfish speedo in global spaces becomes a political act of supporting queer brothers and sisters of the places visited by crossing borders, territories, policies and laws in the benefit of other queer lives. Limitations: Although travelling could be seeing as a privilege, some members of the team risk their own well-being by taking the project to the next level, taken photos that become activism through acts of freedom. “Global Speedos” delivers a view of a community that is organized around water polo as a sport and that is delivered and showcased in international competitions. The Triggerfish speedo has the logo of the team, and a maple leaf that represents Canadian values and principles, that are recognized across the world. In many ways, the Triggerfish depicts the bodies of ambassadors of LGTBQ freedom to new territories of imaging LGTBQ’s visibility.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wellesleyjerry/media_set?set=a.10156422001620050&type=3 Jerry, G. Betancourt. (2019, October 11) Global Speedo: https://www.facebook.com/wellesleyjerry/media_set?set=a.10156422001620050&type=3

BIO: Gerardo Betancourt is a Communities Without Borders (CWB) Sexual Health Education & CBR Evaluator at Centre for the Spanish-Speaking Peoples. He is also a PhD Candidate at the Factor-Inwentash, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. Gerardo was born in Mexico and moved to Canada in 2000. He has worked in the field of Education for over 25 years and has worked in HIV Prevention for 14 years. He has published in journals and books chapters and has presented his interventions, methods and approaches in domestic (CAHR, OHTN, CHIR, UWW) and international conferences (United States, Mexico, Colombia, Australia, France, Spain, and Switzerland). Gerardo has been working as an educator for more than 25 years in several countries. His educational projects have been implemented and evaluated in Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Canada. He has been working in the field of Sexual Health for the past 10 years and has published in international book chapters edited by universities and numerous peer-reviewed journals. He has developed theories and theoretical frameworks to better understand intersectionalities, sexualities, qualitative methodologies, epistemologies, and sexual health practices. Gerardo has presented his research in countries such as Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Australia, and the USA. Gerardo has been part of the Toronto Triggerfish water polo team since 2007.

Ph.D. Candidacy (June 2017); M.Ed. (2010) Master in Adult Education and Community Development. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE); BA in Law (1995).

PRESENTER 2: Debleena Tripathi PRESENTATION TITLE: The Making of Ichchhaamoti: Understanding Gender

ABSTRACT: Abstract: This essay is a reflective practitioner’s account of the collaboratively created play-text and performance named Ichchhamoti. “Ichchhaamoti”, a poetic word in Bengali, can be literally translated as ‘embodied desire’ or ‘full of desire’ or even, ‘as you desire’. The process was primarily meant to be a journey for the preparators to reflect on concept(s) of gender in a safe, non-judgemental space. The final performance, open for audience, turned out to be a celebration of diverse expressions of gender identities and sexual orientations. It was also, perhaps, a sharing of the space of understanding with the audiences present. In a deliberate attempt to bypass often confusing terminologies and to facilitate a defamiliarized perch from which the audience could perceive and reflect, the setting of the play was removed to a world of funny, rule-abiding ghosts who strive to maintain the same status-quo as they had in their human lives. Conflict ensues as a newly arrived ghost requests a gender change, something unheard of in the ghost world. The play involved cross-dressing and participants identifying as women playing roles of men (rather, ghost-men) and vice-versa. The incidents in the play mirror the confusions, observations, and lived experiences of the participants/play-makers who come from different backgrounds and understandings of gender. It is to be noted here that when Ichchhaamoti was first staged at Kolkata, India, on 10th December 2017, sexual intercourse between two consenting individuals of the same sex was considered a criminal offense in India under Section 377 of the Indian Penal

Code. Incidentally, 10th December was also the day on which the 16th Kolkata Rainbow Pride Parade took place. Only a month later, the Supreme Court of India decriminalized consensual gay sex on 6th September 2018 on the ground of privacy as a Fundamental Right as enshrined in and protected by the Constitution of India. Popular media in India, at this time, was raging with several debates regarding gender and sexual orientation in social and legal spheres. While protests by activist groups were commonplace, they often did not communicate to the masses in an accessible rhetoric. This is the gap the process of Ichchhaamoti and the performance of the play intended to address, in its limited capacity.

The essay draws from audience and participant feedback to reflect upon the effectiveness of this effort. It also discusses whether Ichchhaamoti qualifies as a practice-as-research project, drawing from different definitions of the same.

BIO: Debleena is a Kolkata based theatre director and playwright. She has worked as a part-time lecturer at the Department of Drama, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata; as a drama teacher in several Kolkata schools, and as a facilitator in theatre workshops for children and adult amateurs. She specializes in using theatre techniques in training and awareness programmes and has engaged with various communities including medical teachers at private 57 universities, women in interior villages of West Bengal and economically underprivileged children in urban fringes of Kolkata. She published her first book of plays (in Bangla) in 2018. Debleena is in Toronto to pursue a PhD at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto, under the Jackman Junior Fellowship. She intends to research aspects of theatre spectatorship in Kolkata.

PRESENTER 3: Robert Motum

PRESENTATION TITLE: Creating Borders: The Performance of Micro-Nationhood

ABSTRACT:

To whom it may concern,

This is a declaration of independence.

We, the undersigned, secede from Canada and declare the seminar room (KS 330) of the Centre for Drama,

Theatre and Performance Studies its own sovereign state.

We look forward to opening diplomatic ties with Canada and welcoming you to the world’s smallest country.

It wouldn’t hurt to bring along your passport.

Sincerely,

______

(your name here)

Borders create. They create nation, culture, and community. They can bring people together, or force others apart. They delineate an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. We define ourselves by our borders. As performance scholars, Ramon H. Rivera-Severa and Harvey Young (Northwestern University) write, ‘[s]imply put: we are the products of the borders that surround us. Our daily performances reflect our bordered existence’ (2011, 1). From Brexit, to migrant separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, to pipelines that cut-across Indigenous land; the global politics of 2020 are preoccupied with borders. I offer my exploration of self-declared micronations as a means of unpacking this ‘bordered existence’.

BIO: Robert Motum is an emerging theatre artist and scholar. With a background in site-specific performance, Robert has staged work on an active city bus, in a castle, over Snapchat, in a dorm room, in a gallery, in a vacant Target store, and occasionally even in a theatre space. He is the playwright of A Community Target, a documentary play which examines the collapse of American retailer, Target, in Canada. The piece, commissioned by Outside the March and Why

Not Theatre was staged in 2018. Recently, Robert directed the Canadian premiere of Michael Ross Albert’s The Grass is Greenest at the Houston Astrodome, and assistant directed the Studio180/Mirvish production of King Charles III. In 2017, he was an invited member of the Stratford Festival Playwrights’ retreat. His book, Kitchener-Waterloo: a guidebook from memory, which invites its reader on a site-specific tour of Waterloo Region, was published in 2016. He holds an MA in Practising Performance from Aberystwyth University (Wales), a BA in Honours Drama from the University of Waterloo, and is a current PhD student in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of

Toronto.

2:00PM – 3:30PM PERFORMANCE TITLE: Revisioning Historical Dance through Post-Contemporary Dance (Two Solo Performances) LOCATION: Robert Gill Theatre PERFORMERS: The Parahumans PRESENTER: Dr. Dave Wilson MODERATOR: Elif Işıközlü

ABSTRACT: Post-Contemporary Dance is not just one new style but a varied approach to creating dances. Whereas the Post-Modern dancers (1960s-70s) were against previously coded styles of Modern Dance, such as Graham/Limon/Cunningham, Post-Contemporary Dance moves beyond ‘rejection’ towards ‘inclusion’ and can mine both

technical and pedestrian options from past styles. Though the current popular Contemporary Dance approaches of

partnering, contact dance, strong kinetic energy, floorwork, clear linear spacing of bodies, focus on the use of hands for counterbalance/weaving movements and generating choreography primarily from body impulses, are lessened in Post-Contemporary Dance, they can all still be utilized in composition. Post-Contemporary Dance takes its direction more, from aspects such as time factors, unusual dynamics, creative body shaping, irregular stage facings, asymmetric groupings, and novel ideas.

To create Post-Contemporary Dances from Historical Dances, the first requirement was to analytically deconstruct the chosen dances from two periods of history - 1800s Japan, and 1960s New York City. Still and moving images, video close-ups, text, autobiographical writings, and choreographic notations were of assistance here. Then, Rudolf Laban’s four theoretical movement structures (body, space, dynamics, relationships), were used as well as imagery, to construct two new dances by adding movement qualities that were absent in the original works, and integrating the current dancers’ idiosyncratic personal movement styles. The essence of each original dance was retained.

PIECE #1: How To Teach Yourself Solo Dancing The Japanese Kabuki dance, drawn/notated/described by Japanese artist, Hokusai in 1821, in his book, ‘How To Teach Yourself Solo Dancing,’ was the starting point for a dance in four sections. The first goal was to accurately recreate a dance from the book using the resources provided by Hokusai. The first two dance sections show this in both a proscenium and repeated, in an ‘in the round’ format. For the third section, high points of sections 1 and 2 were mutually chosen by the artistic director and solo dancer to expand into a hybrid form, thus blending past and new choreography. The fourth section was a completely new 20-minute solo creation, generated by images, the dancer’s memories, and folk/electronic music by Japanese composers.

PIECE #2: Solo Z: The Muscles Think In Infinite Parts The classic Yvonne Rainer dance, Trio A: The Mind Is A Muscle – Part 1, was chosen for research and to be inspired by. Rainer exemplifies the pedestrian style of the post moderns, with little traditional modern dance technique, yet conveys postural and gestural fine control and detail. The artistic director and solo dancer firstly worked in the studio on themes derived from Laban Movement Theory, such as – levels, speeds, opening-closing, shape-size. Secondly, a few key movement motifs from Trio A were selected for experimentation. For example, Rainer performed many small movements in space, often turned and prioritized use of the three planes of action. The third experiment was to identify some movements that were not in Trio A. Diversity was increased to include - harder/quicker movements, core initiation, and stopping more frequently. By blending these themes, the Post-Modern Dance was converted into a Post-Contemporary Dance.

PRESENTER BIO: I experienced Rudolf Laban’s Creative Dance as a child in 1950s England and also studied Labanotation as a PE student in the 1970s. Later in the 1970s, I studied Improvisation at the Centre of Movement in Toronto, and Synergy in Vancouver. I have performed, choreographed, taught and lectured in Canada, England, Scotland, Sweden, Hungary, USA, Australia as a dance professional, or as a Professor. My M.A. from York University is in the area of

Dance/Somatics. I retired from McMaster University, June 2015 after 30 years as a Dance Specialist in the Department of Kinesiology. I founded my interdisciplinary dance company, The Parahumans, in 1993 and have toured England twice. I created choreography for people with Parkinson’s Disease, that they could learn through an interactive Microsoft Xbox avatar. I also made choreography for ‘Nesia,’ a Holocaust dance film, and ‘Boy Dancer’ 47-minute documentary received the

2011, ‘Fan’s Choice Award’ at the New York Long Island film festival. Recent productions include – ’21 Chopin Nocturnes’ - a 2-hour show for 9 dancers; ‘New Jazz Dance Improvisations’ – using classic jazz music; ‘Tragi-Com Dance Theatre’ – writings for movement/dance theatre; ‘Triad’ – two 30-minute solos created with long-time (8 years) dance collaborators, Lauren Runions and Yui Ugai.

2:00PM – 3:30PM PAPER PANEL THEME: (Re)membering(s): Constructing Diasporic Bodies Through Time, Travel, and Memory LOCATION: Walden Room MODERATOR: Ryan Borochovitz

PRESENTER 1: Ghinwa Yassine PRESENTATION TITLE: Body as Cocreator: Explorations in Performing Sense Memory

ABSTRACT: In this lecture performance I will weave together an autobiographical story with theoretical analysis around the subject of sense memory (Charlotte Delbo). The work will be presented using storytelling, movement and projection. The method I follow mixes fact, fiction and theoretical reflection. While the narrative part is still in progress, the

following is the theoretical premise that will inform the final presentation.

“Charlotte Delbo distinguishes the memory of the processes of trauma and its affective impact -sense

memory- from ordinary memory, in which events are interpreted and placed within a temporal or narrative framework” (Jill Bennet). This can be said of a colonized body, a body with an old pain, a body with memory, a memory body. These bodies are a process of processing. Whether through dreams or moments of clarity, the body is always trying to tell us what thoughts and emotions it’s working on processing. We just empty ourselves to be vessels, a conduit, and the sense memory will make itself manifest. We bear witness to our own body, to its memory. These bodies are performative

61 bodies. Through performance, the body exteriorizes what it witnesses of itself. “This process of bearing witness externalises the traumatic event as an experience that may be both told by survivor and heard by the listener for the very first time.” (Guerin and Hallas) And this is the beginning of a transformation. The instinct of the intuitive artist is to exhaust the memory, or let it sit in her gut and watch it turn into words, movement or breath.

Veen Das puts trauma in the register of the imaginary and the symbolic, intense experiences cannot be processed intellectually. A sense memory performance is an affective journey into this register of the imaginary. It’s a place where knowledge shifts between fact and fiction, where the body holds an ahistorical truth. It is a process of another kind of transformation, the one from the individual to the collective. In this process, the body is cocreator, the artist is a witness to her own body, but the audience is a witness to the artist’s body. In Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain, Veen Das alluded to the possibility of “having pain in another person’s body”, or even the need for this possibility, for an emotion to be fully graspable by another person. The artist communicates with her audience through breath and movement and ineffable bodily transmissions and more importantly, through emotions.

“Emotions do things, and work to align individuals with collectives – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments.” Transforming herself, all the while mirroring feelings, the artist is delineating “a collective body”. “Feelings make ‘the collective’ appear as if it were a body in the first place” (Sarah Ahmed). It can then be said that sense memory performances are attempts at creating a collective body, or attempts at reintegrating with the collective, thus completing a rite of passage for the artist’s body in pain.

BIO: [Lebanese, b. 1984, based in Vancouver, Canada] Ghinwa Yassine is an anti-disciplinary artist based in Vancouver. Her work uses a variety of media including film, installation, performance, text and drawing. She grew up in Beirut,

Lebanon at the end of the civil war there, yet she’s affected by traumatic amnesia, making memory and its unreliability a recurrent driver in her work. Her projects, narrative-based for the most part, start from personal and historical memories that are experienced relationally and address themes such as safety, resiliency, anxiety, empathy, and survival. Using hybrid forms of storytelling, where story manifests as somatic experiencing, ritual and gesture, she explores the intersections of fact and fiction in autobiographical narrativity. Yassine pursues a community-based research around the collective healing potential of autobiographical art, teaching collaborative writing techniques that she has developed over the years.

PRESENTER 2: Rohan Kulkarni PRESENTATION TITLE: Performance of Cultural Memory Through the Body in Anusree Roy’s Letters to My Grandma

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I will explore the performance of memory by the diasporic body, noting the complex simultaneity and competing cultural identities that express themselves through such a body. Using Indo-Canadian playwright Anusree Roy’s 2009 play Letters to My Grandma as a case study, I will further argue that embodied storytelling and performance allows the diasporic subject to engage in the process of decolonization.

Letters to My Grandma offers a glimpse into the present-day diasporic legacy of Hindu-Muslim conflict brought on by the partition of India in 1947, which marked the end of British rule in the subcontinent. This one-woman show (performed by Roy herself) tells the story of Malobee, a Hindu Indian woman in Toronto about to marry a Muslim man. She thinks of her ailing grandmother in India, a survivor of the partition who dislikes Muslims on principle. Through a series of letters and flashbacks, Malobee experiences the horrors of partition while also grappling with her grandma’s disapproval of her groom. Switching between multiple roles and time periods, Roy presents the audience with contesting narratives and realities located in one diasporic body.

Roy’s play is an example of inverting “the primacy of a physical interiority by demonstrating its necessary dependence on a corporeal exteriority, and to understand this exteriority as the very ‘stuff of subjectivity’” (Bleeker 6).

She moves away from logocentrism and introduces multilingualism to destabilize meaning-making. By presenting not one, not two, but multiple characters through the same body, all located in several temporalities, Roy complicates unidirectional signification and activates the passive spectator into a ‘seer’. At any given moment, the seer must discern who they are looking at, and that can change rapidly. This is important because depictions of non-Western stories are mostly tainted with Orientalist fantasies, even when being created by the cultural Other. In doing so, I argue that Roy’s diasporic body in performance becomes a site of decolonization.

Works Cited

Bleeker, Maaike. Visuality in the Theatre. London: Routledge, 2008.

Roy, Anusree. Letters to My Grandma. Toronto: Playwrights Canada. 2010.

BIO: Rohan is a PhD student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. He holds an MA in Drama from the University of Alberta and a BA Honours Double Major in Theatre & Political Science from York University. His 63 research interests include intercultural performance, South Asian theatre in Canada, community engagement for the arts, and production dramaturgy. Rohan has taught as a sessional instructor at the University of Alberta, hosted pre- performance talks and panel discussions for Edmonton Opera, worked as a production dramaturg, and contributed program notes for several theatre and opera performances.

PRESENTER 3: Julija Pesic

PRESENTATION TITLE: The Cleaner: Marina Abramović for the Second Time in Belgrade

ABSTRACT: My paper The Cleaner: Marina Abramović for the Second Time in Belgrade explores the elements of performativity in the retrospective exhibition Marina Abramović—The Cleaner. This retrospective took place for the first time in an artist’s born city Belgrade, running from September 2019 to January 2020. I claim that The Cleaner demonstrates a complex intersectionality of performance and visual arts in which the artists body represents departure point for a self-constructed mythology, different from the body of her work of art. In other words, my paper is focused on the status of the body as a dual self. I am interested in whether Abramović rethinks her new position as an artist in a globalized world. Or, ironically, does she challenge the global consumerist culture that has launched her popularity

(to a certain extent) and post-MoMA celebrity status? Consequently, I explore the reception of Abramović’s work and personality, elaborating on the Balkans’ scepticism towards her work and her North American post-MoMA success. I investigate where Abramović is, between local culture and her global success (North American and/or the Balkans; Western and/or Eastern; Global and/or Local, etc.), and how her new position in the global market has changed the meaning of artist and art work within a local culture.

BIO: Julija Pesic is a PhD Candidate at University of Toronto, focused on performance art, cultural anthropology, and cultural studies. Her doctoral dissertation project investigates cultural specificity and global dynamics in the performance art of Marina Abramović, a Belgrade-born, New York City-based performance artist, now best-known for her record-breaking 2010 MoMA retrospective. This exhibition drew over 850,000 visitors within three months with its central event The Artist Is Present⎯ a 736-hour and 30-minute live performance⎯ in which Abramović invited each audience member to sit opposite to her in the museum’s atrium. Julija’s doctoral project is awarded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, including the Metal- Trebbin-De Boni Scholarship for the strong academic record. Julija is also an alumna of Harvard University’s Mellon

School of Theatre and Performance Research. Before immigrating to Canada, Julija completed BA honours in South Slavic Literature and MA in Dramatic Literature at the University of Belgrade with expertise in subversive humour in contemporary European drama. Her research work comprises performance art as well as interaction of literature, theatre, and film.

2:30PM – 4:30PM PAPER PANEL WITH A PERFORMANCE THEME: Revelations – Situating Selfhood Using Costume, Cabaret, and Cosplay LOCATION: Performance Studio MODERATOR: Dr. Matt Jones

PRESENTER 1: Luana Valentim PRESENTATION TITLE: The Bar Owner

ABSTRACT: The performance brings to the scene an androgynous and queer body, immersed in the Brazilian corporeality of samba, maracatu and capoeira. The work was born as a response and an action of resistance to the dark times we are going through in Brazilian society nowadays. With my body, I establish a game between the male and

the female genders, inspired by two archetypes of Afro-Brazilian culture, the “malandro” and the “pomba-gira”.

BIO: Luana Valentim is an actress, performer, playwright and percussionist. She is a senior at the Theatre School of the

Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – UNIRIO and a member of the project Incoherent Cabaret, which investigates cabaret performance. She has performed in several plays, such as: "Sade’s Cabaret" (2018-2020), in which she also signs the dramaturgy, "Phoenix’s Cabaret" (2018) presented at Campinas International Theater Festival, and "Carioca’s Cabaret" (2017), all directed by Christina Streva. In the movies, she starred in "Chocante - O Filme" (2017), directed by Johnny Araújo and Gustavo Bonafé and "Aumenta que é Rock and Roll "(2019), directed by Tomás Portella.

PRESENTER 2: Dr. Christina Streva PRESENTATION TITLE: For a Provocateur Performer: Deviant Bodies and Dissident Expressions in Brazilian Cabaret

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the body in cabaret performance both from a historical and a pedagogical approach. I will start by analyzing the work of several cabaret performers in Brazilian history, such as Luz del Fuego, Madame Satã, Dzi Croquettes, Laura de Vison and Suzy Brasil to argue that these artists, with their libertarian work, anticipated several trends of the contemporary scene. They exalted the representativeness of the non-normative body on stage, through actions of resistance and empowerment that challenged the patriarchal society. I will then share the acting pedagogy I have been developing at Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – UNIRIO to approach the study of cabaret from the perspective of the body and to use it as a pedagogical tool for empowering our students. The creative process aims at guiding the students through a personal journey of discovery of the cabaretista that exists within each one of them. Inspired by the ideas of Paulo Freire and Roberto da Matta, the objective of the work is to approach the concept of a provocateur performer, one who commits himself to the present, produces his own art, and places himself critically in relation to the neuralgic themes of society.

BIO: Christina Streva is Ph.D. in Theatre, Associate Professor of Acting, and Vice Director of the Theatre School at

UNIRIO. She graduated summa cum laude in Theatre Direction and Political Science at Lawrence University with an IIE / Fulbright scholarship. In 2016, she was a visiting scholar at the Drama Department at Tisch School of Arts – NYU. As a director, she has worked in several plays in Brazil and in the USA. She was the founder and the artistic director of the ensemble SerTão Teatro, a theatre group that has presented plays in more than a hundred cities in Brazil and received some of the most important grants in the country. Since 2014, Streva has coordinated the Devised Theater Laboratory at UNIRIO where she develops several projects. She has also published articles and presented work in congresses in and out of Brazil. Her research focuses on popular performance, cabaret and collaborative methodologies.

PRESENTER 3: Taylor Thompson (CANCELLED)

PRESENTATION TITLE: “I Control The Truth!”: (Re)Imagining Worlds and Exploring the Relational Self Through Cosplay

ABSTRACT: By drawing on auto-ethnographic primary data collected through an anthropological special topics research seminar, I explore my own experiences with myself and others as I learn the skill of cosplaying for the first time. I walk through the material, social, and affective dimensions of relating intimately to a fictional identity, crafting a costume, and learning to embody an identity through acting. I consider the processes of ‘translating’ a character from a medium,

66 like film or television, into embodied contexts like social gatherings or performances. I critically consider the politics of bodies, ability, and gender in relation to cosplay, challenging expectations of ‘authenticity’ in representation in favour of personal exploration and empowerment. By focusing exclusively on strengthening my bond with one fictional character, ‘Mysterio,’ I explore the affective dimensions of embodying anger, unpredictability, narcissism, and desires for extreme political action, in imaginative contexts.

This project seeks to understand how a point of personal crisis in identity and traumatic experience can be transformed into identity play and self exploration by engaging with fandoms at an intimate, embodied level. It also connects this exploration to wider social and cultural contexts, considering the ways in which fans must negotiate complex relationships with larger media conglomerates, who may promote official Canon that invalidates or opposes the stories or personalities fans assign to fictional characters. Last, I consider the cosmological, or the spiritual, in the form of moé love for incorporeal characters, and how this connects fans spiritually to our contemporary folklore known as popular culture.

BIO: Taylor Thompson is an undergraduate student studying in both the Anthropology and Book & Media Studies departments at the University of Toronto. They are primarily interested in the relationships between media, sociality, and communities, and critically consider the ways in which we live through media to understand ourselves and connect with others, focusing on social and mental health. Their work has been published in The Foolscap: Book & Media Studies’ Undergraduate Journal, funded by the University of Toronto’s Undergraduate Research Fund, and has been presented at conferences across Canada.

PRESENTER 4: Julia Matias PRESENTATION TITLE: Neo-Burlesque and Exoticism

ABSTRACT: Neo-burlesque is a performance practice which began in the 1990s that typically occurs as a series of short acts that centre on the removal of clothing, privileging “tease” as its primary focus over the revelation of the body.

(Willson) Drawing from striptease history, third wave feminism, pop culture, rockabilly, queer nightlife, kitsch, and a variety of other influences, neo-burlesque began as an underground movement with a radical potential to transgress cultural and gender norms. Yet neo-burlesque has a history of recreating the figure of the “exotic other” onstage, a role which had been fundamental to neo-burlesque’s development as a genre (Hartman). Throughout its 20 year

development, white neo-burlesque performers have often taken advantage of playing orientalist and primitivist characters in their routines as specific gimmicks, while “exotic” performances gesturing to distant cultures have been typically expected of performers of colour (Mansbridge)(Ross). In this paper, I will document how neo-burlesque performers respond to these pressures to gesture to the “exotic other” as erotic display through their work, utilizing a

few core examples from the repertoires popular neo-burlesque performers in the United States and Canada. As an art with unmitigated potential for representation and which has the freedom to operate outside of normative ideals of performative virtuosity (ideals which are largely racially coded), neo-burlesque provides its practitioners an emancipatory site to play with the semiotics of both parody and desire. As such, neo-burlesque performers can be both stretched toward and "snap back" at colonial histories which dictate of the conventions of the form. My paper will examine how neo-burlesque performers navigate pressures to engage with exoticism through being able to return to

their own creative autonomy by simultaneously gesturing toward exoticism while calling it into question.

BIO: Julia Matias is a PhD candidate working on a collaborative degree with the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and

Performance Studies, and the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She holds a BA in Devised Theatre and English from York University, and an MA from CDTPS. Her research centres around representations of exoticism as they are staged and challenged in neo-burlesque performance. Matias is also an award-winning neo- burlesque practitioner and a co-producer of the “Creme de La Femme” feminist cabaret series in Toronto.

3:30PM – 4:30PM PAPER PANEL THEME: Occupations – Positioning the Ethics and Pedagogies of Political Physicality LOCATION: Seminar Room MODERATOR: Jessica Watkin

PRESENTER 1: Sarah Robbins PRESENTATION TITLE: #Activism and the Academy: #MeToo Stories of Theatre School Student Bodies

ABSTRACT: The campus is the scene of violation. A fantasy space. The campus. The co-ed. The rapist. The raped. In the psychic space of the campus they become each other. One conjures the other, as a risk. The campus becomes, within the contemporary discourse of rape, the place where rape happens" (31).

-- Campus Sex, Campus Security, Jennifer Doyle (2015) 68

This paper will look at the ways that student bodies are using social media as a space for #activism within the academy, and considers social media's role in instigating long-needed institutional change. Beyond the larger #MeToo hashtag, students in post-secondary performance training programs have utilized social media platforms to build public conversations that speak back against histories of inequity while holding space (both virtual and physical) for victims of abuse. How can performance training be taught within the university campus after #MeToo?

The sites of activism under discussion in this paper are characterized by a debate about institutional responsibility towards students: hashtags like #IBelieveHer, #MeTooPhD, #CanListIsntAlone, and others, highlight that stories of institutional abuse are being reported in large numbers and have mostly gone unaddressed by administrations and faculties. #Activism positions the nature of engagement within spaces of performance training (the so-called "safe space" for taking risk and engaging vulnerability)-- a space itself embedded within the university campus--against the liberatory virtual space of social media, raising questions about the future of the form of performance training in a shifting culture.

BIO: Sarah Robbins is a PhD Candidate at UofT's Graduate Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS).

She holds a B.A. Hons. and a diploma in Professional Actor Training from the theatre and drama studies program jointly held at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College, and an M.A. from CDTPS. Recently, Sarah co- organized the inaugural GYB Acting Educator's Conference at Tarragon Theatre, as well as the 2019 FOOT Conference at CDTPS on the theme of "Equity & Diversity in the Performing Arts." Current projects include working as a Research Assistant for the SSHRC-funded Gatherings Partnership, assisting on The P.L.E.D.G.E. Project (a collaboration between the Playwrights Guild of Canada and the Equity and Diversity in the Arts Department at the University of

Toronto Scarborough), participating in the JHI Working Group “Imagining a Music-Theatre Curriculum in North America,” and acting as a core member of Got Your Back Canada (GYB). She has shared her work at CATR and PSi, and has published her work in alt.theatre magazine, and HowlRound Theatre Commons.

PRESENTER 2: Jeff Gagnon PRESENTATION TITLE: Virtual Fragilities and Cyberspace Materiality: Political Performances of the Body Under Duress

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the relationship between information and communications technologies and resistant performances that foreground material human bodies as fragile. Rather than accepting Gibsonian conceptions of

cyberspace as ethereal, hallucinatory non-space, I propose instead a consideration of cyberspace as ontogenetic and material – continually produced through everyday practice. This notion of material cyberspace is informed by Doreen Massey’s conception of “progressive spaces” and Glen Sean Couthard’s elaboration of Dene practices of “grounded normativity.” It is my contention that the distinction between virtual and material bodies breaks down in the face a

cyberspace that is understood in terms of its materiality.

This paper makes use of two case studies:

1. In December of 2012 Theresa Spence, then Chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation, engaged in a highly publicized hunger strike against the government of Canada as a part of the Idle No More movement. 2. In May of 2014 Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation performed his own death before an audience and before the global media. The virtual death of Marcos was a response to the politically motivated ambush, torture, and execution of an Indigenous Zapatista teacher and comrade.

Works Cited

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2014

Massey, Doreen. “Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place.” in Bird, Jon et al Mapping the Futures: Local

Cultures, Global Change. London; New York: Routledge, 1993. pp. 60-70.

BIO: Jeff is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies.

3:30PM – 4:30PM PAPER PANEL THEME: Repetitions – Connections in Gesture, Language, Improvisation, and Resolution LOCATION: Walden Room MODERATOR: Maria Meindl

PRESENTER 1: Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller PRESENTATION TITLE: Subject & Object: Embodiment and Agency in the Staging of Trauma

ABSTRACT: In my Undergrad Thesis and Independent Study I explored repetition and resolution as tools used in theatrical performance and storytelling as well as how these themes are present in the post traumatic experience. In this presentation, I want to elaborate on the idea of bodies as subject and object onstage that I illustrate in my thesis paper. My focus will be on the choices made by theatre creators that grant and deny agency to characters involved in stagings of trauma and the exploration of what is beyond.

BIO: Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller is a performer, improviser and aspiring scholar who's work focuses on the intersection of trauma and performance. During her undergrad thesis at the University of Toronto, supervised by Dr. Seika Boye, she explored themes of repetition and resolution in the staging of sexual assault. Fateema intends to continue this research in an interdisciplinary grad program at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2020.

PRESENTER 2: Keira Mayo with Sammy Roth PRESENTATION TITLE: Shoulda Said: Games in Tense, Regret, and Choice

ABSTRACT: Oh, I wish I would have said that in the moment: a thought or feeling state for which there is no word in English. Such a word does, however, exist in German. Treppenwitz, though untranslatable into English, refers more commonly to a sense of the ironic where there exists a quick slide between truth and a bad joke. Interestingly, treppenwitz can also name “that which you should have said but only occurs once it is too late.” This two-part project asks not only what would change if one could or was forced to return to a previous moment but also how do experiences of the longing to revise impact a future self. Further, how is such a revisionist desire and effected future lived and performed through the body? “Shoulda Said” is a common short-form improv game that is routinely played during Theatresports competitions at Bad Dog Theatre in Toronto. Theatresports is Canada’s longest running improv show and approaches improvised comedy as if it were a competitive sport. In “Shoulda Said,” at any point during a team’s scene the referee/judges (and sometimes audience members) can call out “Shoulda said!” requiring the improviser to alter their last phrase or sentence. Through a part paper, part performance, this project asks after the relationship between the feelings associated with identifying the treppenwitz in everyday life and the moment of being obliged to create a treppenwitz-like utterance during an improvised game-style performance. What happens when the concept of treppenwitz, whose realm is the past, is transposed onto improvisation’s hyper-presentism?

While the paper portion of this project, grounded in close readings of performances of “Shoulda Said” at Bad Dog Theatre, will discuss what rule-bound game form can bring to bear on concerns over what should have been said, the performance element will experiment with the way a “Shoulda Said” performance structure is experienced through movement-based improvisation. I wish I would’ve stood up straight in that photo. The performance, “Shoulda

Done,” is composed of two improvised iterations. During the first, audience members are welcomed to oblige the performer to alter their previous movement. During the second, the performer will re-perform the sequence from memory and choice. Which choices are made or even available to memory during this second iteration? What is offered upon the collapse of the temporal realms bound up in treppenwitz and “Shoulda Said?”

PRESENTER BIO: Keira is a first year Ph.D. in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies with collaborative specialization in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She holds degrees in Performance Studies (NYU 2018), Gender Studies (McMaster 2017), and Philosophy (University of Toronto 2016). Interested in failure and self-censorship

in on and off-stage competitive improvised performance, Keira’s research uses game as an analytic to explore the

material and social effects of capitalizing on improvisation’s heralded transformative potential, particularly for the queer of colour improviser and worker. Her research, writing, and art-making have displayed across Ontario and New York including the University of Toronto, Queens University, York University, the Kimmel Galleries, and cyberspace. Keira currently works as an editorial assistant for Theatre Research in Canada and serves as the assistant director for the online magazine and performance space th_Eroses. She is committed to experimental form, decolonial praxis, collaborative art-making, and going slowly.

PERFORMER BIO: Sammy Roth is a dance artist and scholar pursuing her PhD in Culture and Performance at UCLA.

Her work considers how whiteness (re)produces antiblackness and settler colonialism kinesthetically by foreclosing capacities to perceive distributed (non)being. She is a 2018 recipient of DSA’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award, and holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU.

3:30PM – 4:30PM WORKSHOP TITLE: Embodied SF (Science Fiction): Prototyping Futures LOCATION: Leonard Common Room in Morrison Hall ORGANIZERS/MODERATORS: Sanja Vodovnik (with Nina Czegledy and Jimena Garcia Alvarez Buylla) 72

ABSTRACT: In line with the conference’s theme we propose an embodied exploration of possibilities offered by guided science fiction (SF) narratives. In 2011 Brian David Johnson published a book called Science Fiction Prototyping in which he proposes a structured writing exercise aimed at rethinking the potential impact of the most recent technology and science. He identifies steps that range from basic world-building to scientific and human inflection to drawing out guidelines for future development of a scientific prototype. But where Johnson envisions imaginary leaps communicated through written word, I want to adapt his proposal for performance purposes, looking particularly at the ways he imagines science working in society and how the human body might be implicated in creating new technologies. The latter is of particular interest to me both as a creative and scholarly endeavour, so my focus would be on that. The goal of the workshop is to make connections between thought experiments that have been a trope of science and science fiction and the embodied possibilities of performance, and explore the ideas that arise when science fiction is thought with and through the body.

PRESENTER BIOS:

Nina Czegledy an independent media artist, curator, and researcher with international and national academic affiliations is based in Toronto, Canada. She collaborates on art& science& technology projects internationally. The paradigm shifts in the arts in a cross-cultural context, interdisciplinary education and practice, eco art and inter-generational issues inform her collaborations. Most recent curatorial projects: Agents for Change/ Facing the Anthropocene, The Museum, Kitchener 2020; Who is You? JD Reid Gallery, New Zealand 2019; Leonardo 50th at Cyber Arts, ARS Electronica, Austria, 2018. Ongoing: Shared Passions, Canada/Mexico 2019-2020; Senses, 2019-2021, Laznia Contemporary Art Centre, Poland.

Jimena García Álvarez-Buylla is an experimental artist who lives and works in Mexico City. They graduated from

Goldsmiths University of London in 2017 with a BA Hons in Fine Art. Their interest in SF stems from the cross- fertilization between a scientific form of thought and their magical thinking. Through transforming objects of science they transform their use in the world. This transformation has aimed to scar open ossified forms of use, and navigate these objects into uncharted forms-of-use, and forms-of-life.

Sanja Vodovnik (she/her) is a PhD candidate at CDTPS. She's worked and trained in Slovenia (ZIZ), Ireland (The Blue Teapot Theatre Company), Iceland (The Freezer) and Toronto. Her interest lies in examining various outlets of staging

and performing science fiction, focusing on its cultural history, dramaturgy, ethics, and the performance of SF fan communities.

4:00PM – 5:00PM PERFORMANCE TITLE: Embodying Documentation LOCATION: Robert Gill Theatre PERFORMER: Colin Tucker PRESENTER/MODERATOR: Caitlin Gowans

ABSTRACT: The agency of microphones has been widely investigated in embodied media arts, for instance in field recording (Yoko Ono, Toshiya Tsunoda), live installation (Peter Ablinger) and feedback systems (Jimi Hendrix, Tomoko Sauvage). However, these investigations have not proceeded beyond the domain of the auditory. My piece addresses

the issue of microphones’ agency more broadly, by approaching documentary audio as a social embodied practice.

Specifically, the participatory performance sets in motion a series of structured human-technology encounters (facilitated by two mobile performers with microphones and portable recording devices) in order to decontextualize documentary audio technologies from their normative modes of operation. For example, performers will record live ambient sounds of the room, exploring a variety of microphone directions and positions with respect to each other and to audience members, and then play back select audio resulting from these encounters. Through subtle but consequential alterations to the embodied actions inherent in the operation of audio recording devices (such as radically

slowing down), the performers foreground the charged power dynamics of simple actions such as turning on a microphone. By framing the microphone as an object of spectatorial attention, rather than a means to the creation of a documentary sound object, the performance aims to call attention to the charged “theater” implicit in seemingly familiar, even mundane digital media practices.

PRESENTER BIO: Colin Tucker works as a practitioner, curator, and scholar of performance. With a background in experimental music, he is artistic director of the interdisciplinary arts platform Null Point and holds a PhD from the University at Buffalo (SUNY).

4:00PM – 5:30PM FEATURED MAGAZINE LAUNCH + PANEL DISCUSSION TITLE: Lost in Translation: Punk, Whack, Waacking, W(h)acking? LOCATION: Front and Long Rooms

PRESENTED BY: The Institute for Dance Studies and The Dance Current, Canada’s Dance Magazine

GUEST PANELISTS: Ashley Perez, Emily Law, Kelvin Bacardii

MODERATOR: Dr. Seika Boye

ABSTRACT: The 28th annual Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) conference at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Bodies in Flux, in collaboration with the Institute for Dance Studies and the Dance Current Magazine, is thrilled to host the panel “Lost in Translation: punk, whack, waacking, w(h)acking?”. Now a

popular dance practice, Punk/Whack originated in queer communities in Los Angeles. As the form spread, what's been lost in translation? How has it shapeshifted to fit into a changing world? This panel explores who the form was created for and who is claiming it now by asking “how does the whacking community in Toronto care for the queer history and bodies that we imitate and adapt?

You will be able to purchase a brand-new copy of latest volume from The Dance Current during this session. Light refreshments will be provided!

5:30PM – 7:00PM FEATURED FACULTY LECTURE TITLE: Spatiality and the Actor's Body: Manifesting the Fourth Wall, an Historical Case Study LOCATION: Robert Gill Theatre

PRESENTER: Dr. Terry F. Robinson

LECTURE INTRODUCTION BY: Anna Paliy

ABSTRACT: My talk asks us to rethink 'the fourth wall,' a perceptual phenomenon commonly associated with the advent of the box set, dimmed auditoriums, and the late nineteenth-century staging innovations of André Antoine. In my analysis of what the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) termed "abstraction" and its link to Denis Diderot's theory of "absorption," I suggest that we understand the fourth wall more capaciously as a realistic effect instantiated

not just by theatre architecture but by scenography, wherein the actor’s body plays a crucial if not more important role than either building or set design. As I aim to show, Siddons realized the fourth wall through her acting practices, and in so doing forged a new cognitive and co-creative relationship between viewer and viewed—an intimate distance that captivated spectators. Her enactment of a distinction between stage and house prior to the structural alterations that came later demonstrates how actors are never simply conditioned by the technology of the stage but actively formulate it, playing an instrumental role in shaping the theatrical environment and theatrical experience.

BIO: Terry F. Robinson specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She is

currently finalizing a monograph entitled Reading the Passions: Form, Feeling, and Expressive Truth in the Age of the

Actor, 1750-1830, which examines how eighteenth-century histrionic theory and practice influenced literary, artistic, and cultural innovation in the late Georgian era. She is also at work on a second book project that examines the politics and poetics of nonbeing in literature and art from the early modern era to the present day. A former fellow with the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University) and the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), her work has appeared or will soon appear in the journals Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and BRANCH, among others.

7:00PM – 7:30PM CLOSING REMARKS from the FOOT 2020 Team: Best FOOT Forward (Robert Gill Theatre)

END OF CONFERENCE

8:00PM – 9:15PM SPECIAL INVITATION, PLAY VIEWING: Tarragon Theatre, The Runner (30 Bridgman Ave) 9:30PM – 10:00PM SPECIAL INVITATION, ARTIST TALKBACK: Tarragon Theatre, The Runner (30 Bridgman Ave)

PARTNERS & SPONSORS

SPECIAL THANKS

We would like to extend our heartfelt appreciation to the following individuals and teams without whom this conference would not have been possible:

Dr. Tamara Trojanowska Alisha Grech, The Centre for Drama, Theatre & Director, CDTPS Masters Student, CDTPS Performance Studies at University of Toronto

Suzanne Micallef Ariel Martin-Smith The CDTPS Technical Business Officer, CDTPS Manager, Theatre Operations, Production Assistants CDTPS Tara Maher The CAP & Work-Study Communications & Events Elizabeth Sutherland Programs Officer, CDTPS Graduate Administrator, CDTPS Dr. Seika Boye The CDTPS Graduate Students Lecturer, CDTPS The Institute for Dance Studies Union at University of Toronto The Dance Current, Tarragon Theatre Canada’s Dance Magazine

WOULD YOU LIKE TO ATTEND BODIES IN FLUX: FOOT 2020 AS A GUEST? PLEASE REGISTER HERE: https://forms.gle/8V6VAj6LZ9VY8MeL6

VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR CONFERENCE DETAILS AND UPDATES: https://foot2020.wordpress.com/

QUESTIONS? E-MAIL US AT: [email protected]

We look forward to welcoming you for two days of discovery and connection in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at University of Toronto on Thursday, February 27 and Friday, February 28, 2020. See you there!