Hysteria: A Festival of Women

Hysteria: A Festival of Women was a recurring arts festival in Toronto. It was founded in 2003 by Moynan King of the Buddies in Bad Times theatre company in collaboration with Nightwood Theatre.[1][2]

Over a ten-day period, Buddies hosted a succession of events particularly for and with the queer women's performance community, including art, installations to dance, film, music, spoken word and theatre.[3]

Hysteria debuted such Buddies in Times' productions as Kinstonia: Dialect Perverso by Ann Holloway, The Scandelles’s Under the Mink (2007), organ-eye-zed crime (2006) by d’bi young, The Salon Automaton: A play for three automatons and one flesh and blood actress (2009) by Nathalie Claude, and The Beauty Salon (2008). By its third edition, the festival featured work by nearly one hundred women.[4]

Namesake

The festival name alludes ironically to female hysteria, an archaic medical diagnosis applied to women the 19th and early 20th centuries. The festival's name is about embracing women's disobedience[5] and reclaiming the term hysteria.

Collaborations

During Hysteria's years of existence, the festival shared some artists, as well as aesthetic curatorial-social-political sensibilities with Montreal's Edgy Women festival.[6]

Hysteria after 2009

2009 was a year marked by an increase in the production of women's theatre works at Buddies in Bad Times, in large part due to the publication of an Arts report by Canada Council for the Arts, entitled, "Adding it Up: The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre," which showed the vast majority of plays appearing on Canadian stage coming from male playwrights.[5] following this season, however, a shift occurred in the programming, beginning with the decision not to renew King's contract as artistic associate which led to the festival's subsequent cessation.

Since then, Strange Sisters has been revived, a one-night festival of queer women's work. In 2015, it was renamed Insatiable Sisters by co-curators Kim Katrin Crosby and Gein Wong. Insatiable Sisters highlights new performance works of queer womyn and trans* folks.

References
  1. "Moynan King". Graduate Program in Theatre & Performance Studies. Retrieved 2022-09-25.
  2. Scott, Shelley (2010). Nightwood Theatre: A Woman's Work is Always Done. Athabasca University Press. p. 53. ISBN 9781897425558.
  3. Kaplan, Jon (October 20, 2009). "Hysteria: A Festival of Women's Performance". NOW Toronto. Retrieved February 18, 2019.
  4. Al-Solaylee, Kamal (2005-10-28). "Women on the verge of Hysteria". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2022-09-25.
  5. King, Moynan, The Foster Children of Buddies: Queer Women at 12 Alexander, Theatre and Performance in Toronto
  6. Cowan, T. L. (2019). "Edgy + Hysteria: Not Like Sisters, or How Montreal's Edgy Women and Toronto's Hysteria Festivals Got It On Across Space and Time". Theatre Research in Canada. 40 (1–2): 118–134. doi:10.7202/1068261ar. ISSN 1196-1198. S2CID 216460003.
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