Location: Roger Bishop Theatre Moderator: Carmen Alatorre Yasmine Kandil and Jena Mailloux, "Reimagined Places of ‘Home’ through Newcomer Immigrant Queer Journeys" Places, locations and experiences from the past are embodied and brought to life in places of the present, creating a reimagined hopeful future for newcomer queer immigrants and refugees. [...]
Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre Moderator: Anthony Vickery Kelsey Blair, "Rehearsing Empire in Canada: Ordinary Spectacles and Performance Venues" From October to December of 2024, Centre Bell in Montreal hosted 19 Montreal Canadiens’ games, 15 performances of Ovo by Cirque de Soleil, and 3 stadium concerts by Justin Timberlake, Sabrina Carpenter, [...]
Location: Design Room Moderator: Karen Fricker Barry Freeman, "Stage Wright: a Celebration, a Critique, a Mourning" On April 19, 2023, my friend and colleague Kevin Wright unexpectedly passed away. Kevin was the Technical Director of the Leigha Lee Browne Theatre at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where I have worked [...]
Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre Moderator: Wes Pearce Shelley Scott, ""We Are All Related": Theatre Calgary's production of Awoowaakii by Sable Sweetgrass" At the June 2025 CATR conference in Regina, Sara Schroete and j skelton delivered a paper entitled “Seen Elsewhere: Queer and Trans Identities as a Place of Liminal Belonging [...]
Location: Design Room Moderator: Narges Montakhabi Jenn Boulay, "Accessible by Design: Building a Future of Inclusive Theatre through Creative Accessibility" This paper examines how embedding accessibility practices--such as audio description and captioning--can enhance accessibility within the theatre. I argue that accessibility is not a “simple add-on” (Dokumaci n.p), but rather [...]
Location: Roger Bishop Theatre Moderator: Jenn Stephenson Adam Paolozza and Karen Fricker, "At The Intersection of Sustainability and Storytelling: A Critical Dialogue between Adam Paolozza and Karen Fricker" Following the Bad New Days production of Last Landscape (January 2025), which blended eco-dramaturgy with physical theatre, Artistic Director Adam Paolozza invited [...]
Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre Moderator: Taylor Marie Graham Amanda Attrell, "“You stole it”: Truth in Cliff Cardinal’s Radical Retelling" In the fall of 2021, Cliff Cardinal entered Crow’s Theatre’s mainstage from behind a red velvet curtain to radically adapt Shakespeare for Toronto’s theatre audiences: “Let’s just be here, together, for [...]
Location: Design Room Moderator: Robin Whittaker Yasmine Agocs, "Nuestro Hogar (Our Home): Collective Memory and Belonging in Latina/o Canadian Playtexts" The looming presence of home for exiles, migrants, and refugees invokes an ambivalent, complex blend of familial warmth and alienating coldness. In Latina/o narratives in Canada, ‘home’ is often depicted [...]
Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre Moderator: Jessica Watkin Kimberley McLeod, "Relative Care: Destabilizing Human-AI Relations in Secret Theatre’s Alone Together" Alone Together by Halifax’s Secret Theatre imagines a world in which family rental agencies have become the norm, particularly as a means of combatting loneliness. The experience takes place in an [...]
Location: Design Room Moderator: Derek Manderson Eva Bojner Horowitz, "Expertise in creative arts in boardrooms: A new perspective on transformative learning and problem solving" Drawing on Eva Bojner Horwitz’s interdisciplinary research and the conceptual foundations outlined in her book "A New Manuscript for societal stages" (2025), this paper presents a [...]