2025-2026 | Upcoming events
We have an exciting calendar of events for the 2025-2026 academic year, including Creativity Night and our regular Alumni and Faculty Reading Series.
Are you a Vic Alumni interested in reading as part of our series, a current Vic student looking for support on a creative event, or an artist in the community interested in participating in one of our cross-disciplinary events? We’d love to hear from you! Please send us an email at vic.creativity@utoronto.ca to be considered for inclusion in our events series. Applications are assessed on a rolling basis; we endeavour to reply to all applications within three weeks of receipt.
More events are added on an ongoing basis. Please check back often for updates.
Registration is available for all of our upcoming events via Eventbrite here.
2025-2026 Events
Jan. 29, 2026 | Performance and/as Translation: I, Your Big Analogue Brother, His F*cking Cat, and You
Join us for an engaging conversation exploring the artistic, linguistic, and dramaturgical processes behind translating the play I, Your Big Analogue Brother, His F*cking Cat, and You by one of Germany’s most prominent contemporary writers, Felicia Zeller. This special event offers a behind-the-scenes look at how a complex contemporary work moves from one cultural and linguistic context to another.
The program will feature a moderated dialogue with Birgit Schreyer Duarte, translator of the play and U of T alumna and Yizhou Zhang, PhD Candidate in the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre, & Performance Studies and former Northrop Frye Centre doctoral fellow, with the moderator to be confirmed. Together, they will reflect on the creative art of translation, the collaborative nature of dramaturgy, and the imaginative decisions involved in bringing a text to life in performance.
About the play
I, Your Big Analogue Brother, his F*cking Cat, and You by Felicia Zeller
“The more I feed the cat, the lower my rent.”
Set in our current world, where every click is tracked and every word recorded, this darkly comic fable asks what the price is for living in a hyper-individualized, technologically advanced society controlled by surveillance tools.
A stranger appears at a shared apartment, claiming to be a friend—with a mysterious cat in tow. The intruder’s organizational skills, analytical intelligence, and uncanny attentiveness soon divide the flatmates, who are either drawn to their order and care or repelled by their watchful gaze. As trust erodes, the flatmates gradually realize that their every word and move is recorded, replayed, analyzed, stored, and can be used against them—until one of them is painted as a terrorist.
This English translation, funded by the Goethe-Institut Toronto, preserves Zeller’s distinctive linguistic style—fragmentation, repetition, looping, and incomplete phrasing—which mirrors the dizzying pace of our information-saturated world and the disconnection of modern human interaction.
Translated by Birgit Schreyer Duarte
Dramaturgy by Yizhou Zhang
About the speakers
Birgit Schreyer Duarte is a German-born dramaturg, director and translator living in Toronto. She studied Dramaturgy in Munich, Germany before completing a PhD in Drama at U of T, focused on cultural identity formation. As a Dramaturg & Artistic Associate at Canadian Stage she was responsible for season planning and production dramaturgy. Birgit has worked in new play development with award-winning playwrights such as Jordan Tannahill (Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom, Governor General’s Award for Drama), Ngozi Paul (The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely), Sook-Yin Lee (Unsafe), and Alon Nashman (Charlotte). For SummerWorks, she created and directed her own stage adaptation of the novel The Piano Tuner. With Dawn Jani Birley’s 1S1 Theatre and Erin Shields, Birgit has been co-developing To A Flame, a play that explores the intersectionality of race-, gender- and ableism-based oppression, set to premiere in 2026. As a director, Birgit specializes in sharing new and international works with Canadian audiences. She also brings her post-dramatic approach to classical texts, such as in Hamlet in High Park (2016), Nathan the Wise in Stratford (2019), Else (ohne Fräulein) (Winner of Austria’s TYA Award STELLA*22) and A Doll’s House, a multi-disciplinary, multi-media production (2022) and Miss Julie (2024) at Bregenz. Birgit has translated over 20 plays from German, most recently the feminist Ibsen-adaptation Peer Gynt (she/her) by Maria Milisavljević. She is the German translator of the award-winning video game performance asses.masses by Milton Lim and Patrick Blenkarn. She has taught and directed at York University, Randolph College and University of Toronto.
Yizhou Zhang (pronounced Yee-joh Jang) is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies and a former Northrop Frye Centre doctoral fellow. Her doctoral research narrates the epistemic life of "gesture" as a mode of knowledge production and social organization in early twentieth-century theatre and performance culture. Her research brings embodiment, performance, and theatricality into dialogue with science and technology, labour, (bio)politics, space-time, and modes of inscription.
As a theatre artist, Yizhou enjoys facilitating intercultural collaborations and multimedia performance in documentary theater, where she interweaves personal stories with historical, political, and sociological facts.
Pia Kleber has been professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto since 1988. For 20 years she was also Director of the University College Drama Program. In 1999 she was made the first chair holder of the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama. Professor Kleber has organized many major international theatre festivals and conferences held at the University of Toronto: Why Theatre: Choices for the New Century (1995); Brecht: 30 Years After (1986); Mirror or Mask? Self-representation in the Modern Age (2002); Faust in the 21st Century Modernity, Myth, Theatre (2004). In 2002 she was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (similar to the Order of Canada) by the German President and in 2015 the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1.Klasse (Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany), the country’s highest civil award.
Jan 29, 2026 | C4C zine-making booth at the Trinity Reads Bookfair
On January 29 from 5-7 pm, Trinity Reads will host a campus-wide book fair in the beautiful Seeley Hall, welcoming readers, writers and creatives across disciplines for an evening of community crafting, bookish vendors and the final vote for this year's Trinity Reads campaign. The Centre for Creativity will be hosting a zine-making booth for guests to take part in as part of the market atmosphere set up by local arts vendors. Students will be invited to visit the booths, learn about different campus organizations and their work, and meet other students with overlapping interests. During the book fair, there will be free snacks and refreshments provided by Trinity for all attendees leading up to the final portion of the evening - a Trinity Reads panel discussion of the 2025-2026 shortlist, ending in a final vote for this year's winning title. We are excited to host students, staff, faculty and alumni across U of T for this bookish gathering to kick off the new year. Registration is available here.
Mar. 30, 2026 | Creativity Night
About the Event
The Centre for Creativity is seeking submissions from current Victoria University students to participate in Creativity Night! Occurring on March 30, 2026, the C4C and CRESA will be hosting Creativity Night—a celebration of all things creative at Victoria University. Any and all creative works are welcome, even if they didn’t originate in a CRE course. Please submit your works for consideration by Sunday, February 22, 2026 before 11:59pm at the link here.