IOTF 2023: INTERNATIONAL ONLINE THEATRE FESTIVAL

Now in its fourth edition, IOTF 2023: International Online Theatre Festival will officially open on April 17. This online festival is jointly supported by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation as a cooperative organization in China and Harvard University Metalab.

This 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.

Their range of artistic approaches and social concerns is astounding. We encourage audiences to journey freely through their worlds and worldviews.

Among the many shows, highlights include productions of The Penelope, by Margaret Atwood, Other People, by Dorota Masłowska, and A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, by Miranda Rose Hall. Well-known theatre companies include Arlekin Players, Greenpig, La Phármaco, The Royal Court Theatre, The Workshop Theatre, Hotel Europa, ProEnglish Theatre, Theatre Barakah, Paroxa, The Center for Less Good Idea, and NTGent.

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 marginalized. Building on our ethos of pluralism and decolonization, 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 marginalized, 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 organizations, including a leading European theatre network, 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 April 17th through April 30th, 2023. Audiences will be able to access the shows via the festival page at:


IOTF will also offer a series of talks and online events related to the screenings, including panels and post-show talkbacks with the artists. Through a range of auxiliary events, we aim to contextualize local works nested within particular cultures for a global, international audience.

TheTheatreTimes.com is an all-volunteer open-access global theatre and performing arts portal. Since its launch in November 2016, TheTheatreTimes.com has published over 5,000 articles and theatre reviews covering theatre in over 90 countries and regions. With 32 thematic sections, more than 150 Regional Managing Editors, and over 60 media partners around the world, we have grown to be the most far-reaching and comprehensive global theatre portal today.

IOTF: International Online Theatre Festival is a yearly event streaming international theatre shows. Since its launch in 2019, IOTF presented over one hundred theatre shows. In total, over 1 million people have participated in the past three editions of the festival.

In 2018, TheTheatreTimes.com won the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA.org). In 2021, IOTF: International Online Theatre Festival was the second-place winner of the Culture Online International Award for “Best Online Project.” A total of 452 projects were submitted from more than 20 countries.

IOTF 2023 is presented in partnership with the European Theatre Convention, DigitalTheatrePlus.com, and metaLAB (at) Harvard. Our sponsors include Emerson College, University of Amsterdam, University of Toronto, The Faculty of Theatre and Film at Babeș-Bolyai University, and all the theatre artists and companies who have given permission for their work to be screened and shared.

IOTF 2023 is curated by Ilinca Todorut with the IOTF Artistic Team, and the team of our Regional Editors: amilton de azevedo, Alex Nderitu, Bahar Kalidag and Ayse Draz, Kee-Yoon Nahm and Walter Byongsok Chon, Maria Bastianes, Marjan Moosavi, Natalia García-casarrubios de la Peña, Tina Rosner, Tomasz Wiśniewski, Xunnan Li, Aidah Nalubowa, Aleks Sierz, Alexandru Condurache, Andres Perez Simon, Daniele Avila Small, Esther Fernandez, John Freedman, Katalin Trencsényi, Patrick Oteh, Robert Walton, and Szabolcs Musca.

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