FOOT 2023: We Live Together

Join us for our 31st annual Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) Conference at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies from February 9 to 11. FOOT 2023: We Live Together explores the broad responsibility we have to each other, to the sciences, to supporting movements toward social justice, to realizing indigenous protocols, to engaging with economics, and to fighting for ecosystems. The conference calls on performance to create spaces in which we can imagine ways to live a future together.

Register now to receive the meeting details and full agenda, which will be coming soon. Registration is free!

Some highlights from this year's conference include:

Keynote Lecture: “We Other Digitarians: The History of Intermediality & the Changing Face of ‘We” by Sarah Bay-Cheng
Friday, February 10th @ 2pm

Dr. Sarah Bay-Cheng is the dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design and professor of Theatre & Performance Studies at York University. Her presentation will ask who is the ‘we’ of today, and more importantly, who gets to say so? This talk breaks down key ideas in the conference core terms: ‘we,’ ‘live’ (both verb and adjective/adverb), and ‘together’ within both performance theory and practice from the perspective of intermediality in theory and practice. Beginning with a nod to Foucault’s opening to The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, this talk looks (briefly!) at the history of intermediality as discipline, subject, and practice as forerunner to contemporary ideas of theatre and our ever-changing audiences.

Keynote Performance, Benevolence, written, directed and performed by Kevin Matthew Wong
Friday, February 10th @ 7:30pm

Kevin Matthew Wong is a co-founder and artistic director of Broadleaf Creative and senior producer and artistic associate at Why Not Theatre. Benevolence was developed at Tarragon Theatre and produced by Broadleaf Creative & Benevolence Collective. The play examines and celebrates the history of the Hakka (客家) diaspora in Canada, who represent some of the first Chinese in Canada. Intimate, epic, personal, and playful, this solo-performance tells the story of the 2000-year migration, and their struggles and triumphs as early Chinese-Canadians.

The start and end times for the conference are as follows:

    Thursday, February 9 – 12pm to 7pm
    Friday, February 10 – 10:30am to 9pm
    Saturday, February 11 – 10am to 9pm

For more information and to keep updated on the latest details about the conference, visit uoft.me/FOOT2023.