Embodied Interventions is a performance festival involving students from LePARC research cluster and beyond. This year’s theme will focus on the overlapping spaces between labour and performance. The work of animation, and the animation of work: to animate a space, to be animated, animare, to give movement or life.  

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In a cultural moment of increased automation and global upheaval, labour becomesdisconnected and disembodied. Experiences of precarity and the realities of global capital touch many more of our lives; shaping the way we perform selfhood, making, and relationality. 

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Work bleeds into life, love and leisure. Animation speaks to both the moving body as the sign of freedom, spirit, and liveliness, and to the movement of labour needed to put into motion, to make things happen, to endow matter with life. To (re)animate in this context might be to return to a politic of embodiment, to value both labour and labourer. 

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Through social media and the digital, our relationships to performance are also changed; we take the invisible for granted and fetishize the performative. The machinations of labour are the undercurrent that animates our lives. The work of the performer becomes the work of the contemporary subject - the production of subjectivity, sociality and emotion.

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We welcome submissions taking up these themes as subject matter directly, or as a frame through which to consider your own relationship to artistic research and collaboration more broadly (how does labour animate your practice, for instance). 

Potential ideas to explore: 

• Anima, animation, animism  

• “The live” in all its transformations (automata, artificial intelligence, machine agencies, machine learning, algorithmic performance, live coding)  

• Bodies at work, factory production, craftsmanship and artisanship, the workshop, the studio  

• Explorations of artistic research and process, training and practice, the labour of art-making and performance  

• Artifacts of the performance-making process not otherwise seen  

• Relationships born of the artistic process: collaborative, friendships, kinship 

• Gig economy, side hustles, ambiguous love-hate relationships to art/work  

• Solidarity and labour justice, organizing, activating and animating  

• Domestic and sexual labour, unpaid labour, racialized and feminised labour  

• The extra labour expected of minoritized bodies – self-advocacy, the work of being in a system that isn’t built for us  

• Invisible labour, immaterial labour, affective labour, cognitive labour  

• Slowing down, rest, and the politics of (dis)ability 

 

The curators invite proposals interpreting the umbrella category of ‘performance’ widely: dance, theatre, performance art, sound, technologically mediated performance, durational, site-specific, lecture-performance, scores, and more. We also welcome proposals for workshops alongside or independent of performance works.

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Participants in Embodied Interventions 2026 will receive:  

• a two-week residency across Concordia spaces, 

• an artist-researcher fee,  

• curatorial support,  

• documentation of the final presentation,  

• and basic technical support for the development and presentation of their work in a two-day showcase at the festival’s end.   

 

Residency dates: May 4th through May 14th  

Showcase Dates: May 15th and 16th  

 

Participants are expected to attend two collective sharing/feedback sessions in addition to the showcase. These sessions are tentatively scheduled for May 4th and May 9th: if you cannot make these dates, please note it in your application. 

 

New, in-process, or completed works are welcomed, however we encourage participants to take the festival as a chance to re-frame, re-invest, and re-animate their work, to embrace the space to try out new ideas and present unfinished work that emphasizes process over product. Applicants should be interested in taking part in a collective process and workshopping with other artist-researchers. 

 

This call for proposals is open to LePARC and Milieux student members, as well as the wider Concordia community. Applicants need to be active students to be eligible. In order to apply, please fill out this form by April 10th, 2026.  

 

If you have any questions about the application process, the festival, or would like to submit your proposal in a different format, please email the curators directly. We are committed to providing accommodations for performers and artists. 

 

Hannah Schallert - hannah.schallert@gmail.com 

Casper Sutton-Fosman - csuttonfosman@gmail.com