Performance and/as Translation | Birgit Schreyer Duarte & Yizhou Zhang

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.

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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.

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Co-hosted by the Centre for Creativity at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, the Goethe-Institut Toronto, and the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Graphic image design by Louis Schreyer Duarte.