Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) 2019: Equity & Diversity in Performance
When and Where
Description
The 27th annual Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) conference at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies invites proposals to our conference entitled ‘Equity & Diversity in Performance’ taking place February 15 to 17, 2019. It asks the following question: What is the changing relationship of drama, theatre, and performance to practices which centralize equity through intersectionality?
Intersectionality, a term first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, asserts that “various forms of discrimination centred on race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and other forms of identity, do not work independently but interact to produce particularized forms of social oppression” (OED). Despite renewed international attention on the changing understanding of equity and diversity sparked by the #metoo and #timesup movements, in what ways are historically-minoritized communities further marginalized by mainstream equity discourse? ‘Equity & Diversity in Performance’ will focus on the changing nature of the field amidst these paradigm shifts in public discourse, aiming both to critically analyze these relationships and to raise awareness of persisting inequities.
This conference engages the work of equity and diversity, including how the work happens in the industry, interrogates how the terms themselves work, and puts pressure on the disproportionate onus of historically-minoritized communities to perform this equity labour.
The Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) began as an opportunity to showcase dramatic works at the University of Toronto’s Drama Centre, growing to become one of the largest student-organized academic conferences in the field nationwide. In an effort to return to its roots and address the importance of centralizing artists and performers in critical conversations about their work, ‘Equity & Diversity in Performance’ will be accepting submissions for both academic and artistic pieces. As such, it will be open to participants of all experience levels in performance and critical theory.
We celebrate and welcome artistic, academic, activist, and interdisciplinary proposals for workshops, lecture-presentations, papers, audio-essays, performances, readings, and other creative and participatory explorations of equity in and through performance. In the case of performances, we encourage submission of short, low-tech or no-tech pieces.