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International Online Theatre Festival 2023 Kicks Off

The festival returns for a fourth edition with an exciting showcase of 39 shows from 23 countries, in partnership with ETC.

17 - 30 April 2023

Now in its fourth edition, IOTF 2023: International Online Theatre Festival will showcase 39 shows from 23 countries, across all six continents, including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Croatia, Finland, Greece, India, Iran, Japan, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, the UK, and the US.

This year’s festival theme, Theatre and Its Others, honours the human, animal, and machine interdependencies of theatre practices and tests cultural, social, political, and economic acts of “Othering.” A contemporary moment marked by wars, health crises, and ecological collapse calls us to care for our shared materiality and environments.

This year’s festival strives to showcase the alterities and the marginalised. Building on our ethos of pluralism and decolonisation, IOTF’s shared curatorship across the network of The Theatre Times Regional Editors fosters a greater representation of the wealth of global theatre practices.

Thanks to this group of global curators and international artists, who present their work pro bono, IOTF 2023 is able to offer high-quality theatre performances to groups typically excluded from theatre experience: the disabled, the elderly, the clinically vulnerable, the homebound, the culturally and economically marginalised, and the geographically distant.

In addition, IOTF 2023 worked with the European Theater Convention to bring to online audiences five STAGES productions from theatres around the world of Miranda Rose Hall's A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (2020). First staged by the British director Katie Mitchell at Théâtre Vidy Lausanne in Switzerland, the production has been taken on as an experiment in sustainable touring by theatres in Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Denmark, and Taiwan.

STAGES (Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift) is an ambitious theatre experiment aiming to challenge how the cultural sector interacts with the concept of sustainability. Fourteen influential theatre organisations, including ETC, a theatre partner from Asia and partners in academia, have joined together with director Katie Mitchell and choreographer Jérôme Bel – two artists renowned for embedding sustainability in their work – to test radical solutions to the biggest challenges posed by the climate crisis.

IOTF 2023 will be launched from 17 April through 30 April 2023. Audiences will be able to access the shows via the festival page, online and for free here

The festival will also offer a series of talks and online events related to the screenings, including panels and post-show talkbacks with the artists.

IOTF 2023 is presented in partnership with the European Theatre Convention, DigitalTheatrePlus.com, and metaLAB (at) Harvard.

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