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 takes place this February 27th and 28th, 2020. The conference 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, 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. Bodies in Flux FOOT 2020 welcomes both artistic and scholarly submissions of any type. These may take the form of performances, scholarly papers, workshops, working groups, studio working groups, panels, roundtables, staged readings, works of art, and any creative or embodied exploration of the theme. In the case of performances we encourage submissions of low or no tech pieces.
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Bodies in performance and on stage
- Bodies of text and bodies of knowledge and the ways in which these 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
The call for proposals has now closed.
Check out the full conference schedule to learn more and register today.
Visit the Bodies in Flux: FOOT 2020 website.
Please address any questions to foot2020.cdtps@gmail.com.
Thank you for your interest in Bodies in Flux FOOT 2020.
