Cosplay-A-Thon: March 12th – 16th, 2012
Members from the Youth Arts Initiative (YAI) will be conducting a fundraising event to raise money for their trip to Toronto this May. They will be soliciting donations by gathering pledges towards their arts creation activities each day from 3 – 8pm, Monday – Friday finishing with the Friday Night Film Festival.
Cosplay (コスプレ kosupure?), short for “costume play”, is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Characters are often drawn from popular fiction in Japan, but recent trends have included American cartoons and science fiction. Favourite sources include manga, anime, comic books, graphic novels, video games and fantasy movies. Any entity from the real or virtual world that lends itself to dramatic interpretation may be taken up as a subject. Inanimate objects are given anthropomorphic forms and it is not unusual to see genders switched, with women playing male roles and vice versa. Cosplayers often interact to create a subculture centred around role play. A broader use of the term cosplay applies to any costumed role play in venues apart from the stage, regardless of the cultural context.
The Cosplay-A-Thon is a weeklong arts creation activity where YAI will be building, sewing and construction costumes and showing costume techniques to any who attend. Donation are welcomes and taken on-site.