Location: Design Room
Moderator: Jennifer Roberts-Smith
Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, “Playing Race Critically: Towards Exploring Embodied Negotiation of Racialized Theatrical Space”
At an existential level, I have been undone by the colonial inheritance we call Canadian theatre. As a working professional of colour, I have been made through innocuous and injurious ways to feel somehow smaller than even the physical boundary of my skin. But I am attempting now to remake myself and others through my dissertation project, Playing Race Critically: Embodied Negotiation of Racialized Theatrical Space. This dissertation uses a virtual reality (VR) game centered on my fifteen-year career (Phase 1) as an elicitation device to enrich conversations with other racialized minority performers regarding their accounts of negotiating racially hegemonic theatrical space throughout their careers. At stake in these conversations (and this dissertation broadly) is an expansion of the concept of “safety” in theatrical space, one that takes into account the ongoing parallel processes of phenomenological identity formation between racially hegemonic and non-hegemonic actors. This paper articulates both the process of arriving at this concern for existential safety, the work left in addressing it, and the tensions between phenomenology, theatricality, and game design that have accompanied me along the way.
Eddie Feng, “Computational Occult: Rehearsing the Post-Pandemic Future in Chinese AI Theatre”
This paper looks at a recent trend in Chinese experimental theatre: the use of artificial intelligence to address the transition into a post-pandemic society. From the virtual lockdown theatre to the hybrid pandemic-era performances, digital venues have provided vital alternatives for artists to navigate terrain that human writers often cannot approach due to its sensitivity. In a nation pursuing a techno-utopian future, their work paradoxically turns toward a form of computational occult, summoning the ghosts of social discontent and contested identity to make sense of an increasingly hollowed everyday life.
I unpack this practice through two case studies. In Lying Flat 2.0 (Wang Chong, 2024), ChatGPT, together with Suno, imagine an escape for the tang ping generation, manifesting their wish to retreat from a world that is always pushing for progress. In My Name Is Red (Zhong Haiqing, 2025), a chorus of LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc.) reconstructs the uproar of the TikTok‑refugee migration, blending scattered online voices into an echo chamber that drifts through endless noise, mimicry, and fragmentation.
Following Yuk Hui (2016), I argue that this human-AI assemblage in theatre presents a vernacular response to the inheritance of technological logic. Recast from technocratic instruments into nodes of a moral-aesthetic order, language machines are situated by Chinese artists within distinctive cultural and ethical imaginaries. This practice is more than a diagnosis a haunted present; it performs an exorcism of algorithmic blindness. It keeps China’s future open to question, rehearsing a change in how we relate to the machines that shape our lives.
Tailynn Smith-Vetter, “Fouettes Into Fascism: Online TradWives as Fascist Performance”
“I wanted to be a Ballerina. I was a good Ballerina.” – Hannah Neeleman
The paper explores the social media phenomenon of “TradWives” through a case study of TikTok creator Hannah Neeleman – founder of Ballerina Farm, mother of eight, and beauty pageant titleholder. By analyzing Neeleman and her performance of traditional gender roles for a large audience the I explore how the performance of digital femininity, Mormon ideology, and the aestheticization of domestic labour contribute to a soft pipeline toward far-right political principle
Despite fashioning her online brand as apolitical homesteading, Neeleman’s content participates in the broader online resurgence of mid century domestic ideals that have been on the rise since 2020 in Western social media. Through close analysis of her media coverage, pageant discourse, the doctrine of The Church of Latter Day Saints, and her own curated digital presence, I argue that Ballerina Farm constructs a seductive visual fantasy of traditional motherhood, made possible only through significant wealth, an unseen labour force, and social media monetization.
Where social media has often been a platform for left-leaning discourse, Neeleman’s content aesthetic is firmly situated in the long history of gendered marketing and the authoritarian family structure discussed by theorists like Wilhelmin Reich and Betty Friedan. By glamorizing strict gender roles in online spaces like TikTok, Neeleman repackages the restrictive norms women have historically resisted, making them palatable through the performative nature of social media.
Biographies:
Shawn DeSouza-Coelho is an award-winning artist, author and magician. He has performed across Canada, written two books, and contributed to numerous academic journals. He is also currently a SSHRC-funded PhD candidate at York University, studying the phenomenology of racialized performers in hegemonic theatrical spaces within the Southern Ontario theatre industry.
Eddie Hanchen Feng is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga. With over ten years of experience in theatre, his work broadly examines the impact emerging technologies have on human subjectivity and artistic sovereignty. In 2023, he co‑produced China’s first AI‑written play, AI: Offending the audience.
Tailynn Smith-Vetter is a recent Masters graduate from the University of Toronto, she is a Stage Manager by trade and a social media scholar by circumstance. As someone who became involved in online spaces at a young age, Tailynn is interested in the ways that social media influences us, and we influence it.