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The 34th annual Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) Conference at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies is open for registration. This year’s FOOT Conference with its theme “Encountering the Threshold” will be held on February 5 (Thu) - 6 (Fri), 2026 at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse at 79 St. George Street. Learn more about the conference in the FOOT 2026 Conference Agenda.
“Encountering the Threshold” invites scholars, practitioners, and artists to reflect on moments of passage, suspension, and transformation. In both performance and global scholarship, thresholds resonate as spaces between memory and futurity, rupture and renewal, where oppositions meet and new meanings emerge. FOOT34 offers a forum to pause, to engage critically, and to imagine how performance might reshape our relation to the present.
This year’s keynote speech is Power Moves: Dance, Culture, Politics.
Keynote Speech - Power Moves: Dance, Culture, Politics
Friday, February 6 at 1 PM, Hart House (Music Room)
Schedule:
1:00-3:00pm - Power Moves Book Launch
3:00-4:00pm - Book Fair
FOOT34 is excited to partner with the Institute for Dance Studies and Hart House to present the Institute for Dance Studies 2026 Keynote Event, which will also be featured as a FOOT34 conference keynote.
This two-part event celebrates the launch of Seika Boye and MJ Thompson’s essay collection, Power Moves: Dance, Culture, Politics, published by Playwrights Canada Press. Hear from Seika Boye and MJ Thompson, alongside contributors to the collection. Following the presentations, stay to explore the book fair and discover recent publications and the incredible work happening in dance and performance research — connect with authors and maybe acquire a book or two!
About Power Moves: Dance, Culture, Politics
This collection of essays focuses on how dance and movement engage and enact political questions around agency, mobility, pedagogy, and resistance. Committed to crossing disciplinary boundaries, Power Moves looks to movement knowledge for its radical insights and critical forms of public intervention and pedagogy.
Keynote Performer: Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban
Thursday, February 5 at 4 PM, Playhouse
Title: Unboxing Care: Balikbayan as Crip Choreographic Practice
balikbayan: a Tagalog word that combines balik—to return or to go back, with bayan—country or homeland.
balikbayan box: a cardboard box carrying gifts for loved ones, the container holding my memories…my space of mourning.
Through this presentation (part talk, part performance, and part dialogue) I unpack the practices through which I am developing pahinga ka muna, a choreographic narrative tracing the mad and queer routes of my Filipinx diasporic inspirations. I invite you to join me in a literal unpacking of the balikbayan box that holds the objects inspiring my improvised practices of pahinga—rest.
Through these practices of rest, I create embodied and poetic descriptions of the movements and gestures that resist being seen through a white supremacist, ableist, sanist, and heteropatriarchal gaze. These descriptions return me to the root of my rest, hinga—breath, to inspire the stories through which I navigate diasporic belonging amidst the colonial/imperial expectations of our being. And while this act of diasporic inspiration is a space of pain, tension, and discomfort, it also becomes a queer, crip, and mad source of creative energy that dreams different choreographies of Filipinx care.
About Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban
Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban is a dance/movement artist, educator, and a PhD candidate in social justice education at the University of Toronto. Miggy’s research and teaching explores critical and creative pedagogies oriented through disability/mad arts and culture, black radical traditions, and dance/performance. Miggy’s current choreographic work explores improvisational practices of navigating mad and queer routes to embody Filipinx (un)rest.
Select dance/creative work:
(2023) pahinga
(2023) Trace
Select publications:
(2024) with Elisabeth Motley, Fragmenting Cripistemology: Gap Movement and Choreographic Practice
(2024) Embodying Maarte: Reinterpreting Queer Performances of Failure through Crip Inspirations
(2023) My Panalangin of (Un)Belonging: Encountering Still Gestures of Prayer, Improvising Still Movements through Depression
(2023) with Elaine Cagulada, In, Against, and Beyond the Ivory: Dreams of Belonging Otherwise through Wonder and Embodied Poetry
The program will be available soon and will offer multiple presentations, panel discussions, and workshops. Please register in advance to receive the meeting details and full agenda.
The full program and schedule will be posted and available very soon. You can also follow us on Instagram at linktr.ee/FOOT34 for updates.