[Candrama] Performance Process and the Politics of Multilingualism: A Two-Part Roundtable Discussion, 14th and 21st of December, 6 -7.45pm GMT

Wed Dec 2 09:42:33 EST 2020

Dear all,

This next event in our Borderlines 2020-2021 Seminar Series involves a collaboration between DMU’s Drama, Dance and Performance Studies Research Institute, the University of Central Florida and Reflections on Contemporary Performance Process (Julia Listengarten and Alissa Clarke’s new book series for Bloomsbury Methuen Drama).

 Julia and Alissa are developing a virtual companion for their book series, Reflections on Contemporary Performance Process for Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. The companion is focused on the ways in which performance processes could and do offer hope, care, joy and productive action amidst a time of great turbulence and extremes. The virtual companion will involve a series of virtual events that are attended in real time, but also recorded and placed online, and will lead into a print companion. We are delighted to invite you to this second event for the virtual companion.

This two-part roundtable discussion (on the 14th and 21st of December, 6 - 7.45pm GMT) places in dialogue a range of speakers based in the UK, US, Canada and South Africa. They have been invited to provide a short provocation that considers how performance processes engage with, and are shaped by, the performance politics of multilingualism. Their provocations and the discussion and debate that will follow will range across issues of race, ableism, identity, economics, power, immigration, exile, cross-culturalism, audience reception, the performativity of language, threatened states, sociotechnical systems and ethics, pedagogy and curriculum, agency, and utopian spaces and practices.

Please feel free to attend either or both parts of the roundtable. We warmly welcome you to the discussion.

Both parts of the roundtable will be chaired by Yana Meerzon.

Professor Yana Meerzon teaches for the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa; and she was appointed a President of Canadian Association for Theater Research in June 2020. Her research interests are drama and performance theory, theatre of exile and migration, cultural and interdisciplinary studies. She is the author of three books, with the latest volume Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism published by Palgrave in August 2020. She co-edited several collections, including Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre with Dr. Katarina Pewny (Routledge 2019) and Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture with Dr. David Dean and Dr. Daniel McNeil (Palgrave 2020).

Part One

On the Economics and Politics of multilingualism in contemporary theatre and translation practices

Monday 14th December, 6 – 7.45pm GMT

To join this first part of our roundtable discussion, which is free, please book through Eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/performance-process-and-the-politics-of-multilingualism-part-1-tickets-131257712351

Speakers:

Maria Delgado is Professor and Director of Research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London and Co-Editor of Contemporary Theatre Review. She has published widely on non-English-language theatre, performance and film cultures.

Provocation:

As we all grapple with whatever a post-Brexit Britain might look at, this provocation looks at the politics of multilingualism in the shadow of the dominance of English as the global language of commerce. What does it mean to think about multilingual performance in an economy where the inscription of English as the language of value pervades the cultural sphere?

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Víctor Ladrón de Guevara is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Plymouth (England) where he runs the MA Performance Training programme. His scholarly work is centred on Acting Training processes, the use and understanding of the body in performance and the interrelationship between theory and practice.

Provocation:

London is considered to be one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Its overwhelming vote to ‘remain’ appears to signal its strong and active links with the rest of Europe. International (or ‘overseas’) students are a sizeable percentage of those enrolled in theatre & performance degrees across the UK HE sector. Yet, the significant absence of ‘foreign accented actors’ in the London stage scene and the rare hiring of academic staff who have a foreign accent is perplexing and requires further analysis. In this provocation, ‘accent’ is treated as a sectionality that reveals both sites of resistance as well as deep and entrenched racist practices in both academia and the theatre cultural industry.

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KARIN COONROD Theater Artist: Director, Writer, Translator

Karin Coonrod is Artistic Director of Compagnia de’ Colombari, born in Orvieto, Italy, based in New York City.  Coonrod directed off-Broadway, around USA, Italy, Russia and Romania. Most recently: The Merchant of Venice in Jewish Ghetto of Venice, Italy and North America; Babette’s Feast (by Isak Dinesen).  Notable productions: Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Love’s Labor’s Lost, King John, Tempest, Roger Vitrac’s Victor Or Children Take Over. She adapted/staged Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Whitman’s Song of Myself (retitled More Or Less I Am); her own texts&beheadings/ElizabethR.  Faculty: Yale School of Drama.

Provocation:

I would like to focus attention on the use of language in my adaptation and direction of The Merchant of Venice in the Venice Ghetto in 2016 and the transfer to North America in 2017, 2018: Peak Performances in Montclair, The International Festival of Arts&Ideas in New Haven and at the Hopkin Center at Dartmouth.

1.The use of language to sculpt the hearing of the play: to honor, provoke and reconcile

2.Language for an International Audience in Venice, Italy: Veneziano for commedia dell'arte: Lancillotto, Gobbo and Bassanio

3. Language for an American audience in North America:

4. Heightened language for Shylock from Yiddish, Sephardic, Veneziano Hebrew: important aspect of the humanity of the character and the framing of anti-semitism

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Margherita Laera is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She specialises in translation and adaptation for the stage, and contemporary European performance, especially in Italy. She is also a professional arts journalist and theatre translator. Margherita is the author of Theatre & Translation (Red Globe Press, 2019) and Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat (Methuen, 2014).

Provocation:

With my AHRC-sponsored public engagement project, Performing International Plays<https://hes32-ctp.trendmicro.com/wis/clicktime/v1/query?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.performinginternationalplays.com&umid=4dd553d7-3c2d-4f19-8805-1c9c9848d20b&auth=abf3dc013bb623204479f0e1f803993cdb4617ca-169f957865f330553128e591c93f3c29c209fce3>, launching in early 2021, I have created an open-access platform for secondary-school pupils and teachers to engage with twenty contemporary plays from five different continents, written in over fifteen languages. One of these plays is Mongiwekhaya Mthombeni’s I SEE YOU, which is originally written in English, Afrikaans, Xosa and Zulu, and specifically centres around multilingual politics in post-apartheid South Africa. Another play we selected, Natalya Vorozhbit’s The Grain Store, about the great famine in Ukraine during Stalin’s era, was adapted into a Zimbabwean context for us by Tonderai Munyevu, who used both English and Shona. The Performing International Plays<https://hes32-ctp.trendmicro.com/wis/clicktime/v1/query?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.performinginternationalplays.com&umid=4dd553d7-3c2d-4f19-8805-1c9c9848d20b&auth=abf3dc013bb623204479f0e1f803993cdb4617ca-169f957865f330553128e591c93f3c29c209fce3> website aims to raise awareness of, and respect for, foreign plays by enriching published international drama with learning and teaching resources, including video extracts in the original languages so that teachers and students can feel empowered to explore theatre from cultures and contexts different from their own.

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Tonderai Munyevu is an actor, writer and creative director born in Zimbabwe and raised in England. He is the co-artistic director of Two Gents Productions. His writing includes: Mugabe, My Dad and Me (York Theatre Royal/ETT—ALFRED FAGON SHORTLIST 2019), The Moors (Tara Arts Theatre-forthcoming publication on Methuen-Bloomsbury), Harare Files; How 700,000 People Lost Their Homes, Zhe [noun] Undefined (Soho Theatre); A Tranquil Mind (BBC Radio 4) The Visiting Hours; A Dispatch From Zimbabwe (Johannesburg Book of Reviews), Bullets (Black and Gay in the Uk-Team Angelica), James Baldwin (Queer Bible.) He is adapting his play MUGABE, MY DAD, AND ME for Audible. He has recently received the Peggy Ramsay Foundation Grant for his next play: Black Museum.

Provocation:

The politics of Multilingualism: who is the “viewer" and the “viewed”?

Can the writer/actor reclaim language and the stage?

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Kaite O'Reilly is a multi-award winning poet, playwright and dramaturge, who writes for radio, screen and live performance. Prizes include the Peggy Ramsay Award, Manchester Theatre Award, Theatre-Wales Award and the Ted Hughes Award for new works in Poetry for Persians (National Theatre Wales). She was honoured in 2017/18 by the international Eliot Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy for her work between Deaf and hearing cultures. She has received a Hawthornden Fellowship, four Unlimited commissions and two Creative Wales Major Awards from Arts Council Wales, the latter leading to The Beauty Parade, a performance at Wales Millennium Centre in March 2020 featuring spoken, sung, projected and visual languages, co-directed with long term collaborator Phillip Zarrilli. She is known for her pioneering work in disability culture and the aesthetics of access. The 'd' Monologues  and Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors is published by Oberon/Bloomsbury. Her first feature film is in development with Mad as Birds Production Company. www.kaiteoreilly.com<http://www.kaiteoreilly.com/>

Provocation:

The form, politics and processes of multilingual performance are immediately subverted when they challenge ableist assumptions about the modes of communication in play. What if multilingualism includes languages that are not spoken, but visual and/or projected? How do the aesthetics of access shape performance processes, and impact on notions of multilingualism on stage, taking it outside the issues of migration and exile?

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Part Two

Performing multilingualism in and against the extremes

Monday 21st December 6 – 7.45pm GMT

To join this second part of our roundtable discussion, which is free, please book through Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/performance-process-and-the-politics-of-multilingualism-part-two-tickets-131264663141

Speakers:

Adela Karsznia is an independent researcher, translator, and editor. She received her PhD in Theatre from the University of Wrocław, and has professional diplomas in Translation (UNESCO centre for Translation Studies and Intercultural Communication) and Cultural Management (Association Marcel Hicter/Polish National Centre for Culture). She is former international publishing coordinator at the Grotowski Institute (2005–12) and her research-writing and translations have appeared in various journals, books, and films. She is co-director of the nonprofit organizations TAPAC and Culture Hub (London, UK), where she has realized several multilingual research projects, and an associate research fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Provocation:

Following the Nazi occupation of much of Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s, vast numbers of ordinary citizens found themselves cast in unfamiliar, often clandestine roles that could be life- and death-defining. Drawing from primary accounts in different languages, this brief paper will touch on performances in extreme circumstances, ranging from the masquerading of Jewish children as non-Jewish adults on the streets of Warsaw to the hidden code-switching of concentration-camp interpreters. It will focus on instances of Jewish ‘passing’—particularly the modes of self-presentation that were often required to conceal an individual’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic origins and create an alternate, ‘socially favoured’ persona. To what extent did these survival strategies hinge on being able to act out multilingual and multicultural behavioural repertoires, in a world of pervasive observation and threat?

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Mongiwekhaya is a writer, performer and director. He has performed in works by Andrew Buckland, Fortune Cookie Theatre company, Market Theater, WellWorn Theater company, and Cirque Du Soleil. He has worked with Handspring Puppet Company since 2011. He is Artist in Residence for Center for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of Western Cape and a member of the SA PLAYRIOT group, a South African collective of activist-driven playwrights. His award- winning play, I SEE YOU (2016), was presented at The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, the Royal Court, London and The Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, and is published by Bloomsbury.

Provocation:

HAUNTED BODIES

Dead languages can haunt living flesh. How do Languages die? And how do they haunt the halls of memory which once housed a human being stamped with their qualities?

I SEE YOU expresses the risks involved in being the tenor of a multilingual encounter, where the very quality of your identity is being refashioned to be like another.

LIFE AFTER YOUTH shows the seductive powers of fashioning another in one’s image. Should your subject suspect they are losing agency, death becomes an optional response.

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Art Babayants/Արտ Բաբայանց is a multilingual theatre creator, educator and researcher living and working in what is now called Canada. Since 2012, Art has been running Toronto Laboratory Theatre, an experimental theatre collective dedicated to the work of first generation immigrants to Canada: www.torontolab.org<https://hes32-ctp.trendmicro.com/wis/clicktime/v1/query?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.torontolab.org&umid=97356b9c-8d38-43a2-97f5-eaaf24b2a07e&auth=abf3dc013bb623204479f0e1f803993cdb4617ca-f3da8255bba6a8ec0474dfde7a2298ece29fe6c1>  He  is currently teaching acting and directing at the University of Ottawa/L'Université d'Ottawa.

Provocation:

The potential of multilingual dramaturgy that does not include translation, but does include multilingual actors and audiences, is not simply giving voice to minority languages and putting up “resistance to a dominant language and culture” (Byczynski, 2000, p. 33). It allows for stereotypes to be exposed and dismantled, for languages to mingle, for acting training methods and theatre cultures to collide, and for artists and audiences to interact, challenging and helping each other. In a way, it offers a utopian space that potentiates multilingual and multicultural encounters without essentializing one’s first or second language cultures and by that disrupts institutionalized isolation of artists and communities.

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Sibusiso Mamba was born in Swaziland in 1978. He trained at RADA in London. He is an actor, playwright, director, screenwriter, teacher and producer. Among his theatre acting credits are: Sizwe Banzi is Dead (Young Vic Theatre London/Eclipse Theatre UK Tour); Father Comes Home From The War and I See You (both for the Royal Court Theatre, London, the latter also at Market Theatre, Johannesburg and Fugard Theatre, Cape Town); Nongogo (Market Theatre, Johannesburg); Romeo and Juliet (Chichester Festival Theatre); Othello (QM2); Train to 2010 (Crossroads Theatre, New Jersey). Sibusiso was International Artist in Residence at Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey, USA from 2012 – 2015. Sibusiso has written numerous plays that have been performed in the UK and in the USA, including plays for BBC Radio. He has also written for many television shows in South Africa including, Isidingo, Bay of Plenty, Binnelanders and Skeem Saam. He has directed in the United Kingdom, United States, and South Africa where he adapted and directed the Naledi award-nominated production of 6 Characters In Search of An Author. Sibusiso has most recently been working in Central and East Africa as Head of Scripted Fiction for Girl Effect - a global organisation that creates media brands to inspire and empower girls and young women to change their lives for the better.

Provocation:

My provocation is from the perspective of someone who works across different language and cultural landscapes across Southern, Central and East Africa, and also in the UK and the US. I want to explore how story is truly received when it has been created by outsiders in English and then translated by local writers into the language(s) of the country it is being written for? Is there a real collaboration happening in these contexts, or is there a hierarchy that asserts itself purely from the fact that the outsiders creating the story are the initiators of these projects? Do the writers in these places feel a sense of propriety over these stories? Do the receivers of the story (mainly in Radio/Television) feel it as an authentic representation of their landscape?

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Duncan Jamieson is an independent researcher, digital humanities practitioner, translator, and editor. He has taught at Rose Bruford College (2003–4), the University of Exeter (2006–9), and been a resident scholar at the Grotowski Institute (2008–12). Since 2012, he has been co-director of the nonprofit organizations TAPAC (www.tapac.co) and Culture Hub (London, UK), managing and collaborating on a range of cultural heritage and research projects, and he is an associate research fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester. His articles, edited texts, and translations have appeared in various scholarly journals, books, and documentary film

Provocation:

Today’s programmable infrastructure determines large parts of our social reality, cutting across various paradigms of performance and performativity. My short paper will focus on the expression of specific cultural and political values within our current sociotechnical systems, and the attendant translation of tracked human activity into aggregations of data that can ‘act’ in the world. It will trace how this selectively encoded information functions as a lively, hybrid artefact—proliferating, migrating, and performing in operations largely beyond public gaze and control, and generating far-reaching consequences, especially for marginalized and minority groups. Taking several examples of algorithmic processing that have profoundly reshaped everyday human performances, this paper will pose a series of ethical questions about the (formal) linguistic representation, normatization, and exclusion of certain bodies and behaviours in contemporary life.

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Please note that this event will be recorded.

Dr Alissa Clarke
Associate Professor (Research and Teaching) in Drama
Director of the Drama Research Group
Faculty Head of Research Students
The School of Humanities and Performing Arts, De Montfort University
Rm 2.18, Clephan Building,
The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH

0116 2078953 / a.clarke at dmu.ac.uk
www.dmu.ac.uk/alissaclarke<http://www.dmu.ac.uk/alissaclarke>

Latest publication:
(2019) 'In Bed with Mae West: Movie Magazine Revelations of the Boudoir as Creative, Training and Central Scenic Space’, in Jeffers McDonald, Tamar and Lanckman, Lies (eds.), Star Attractions: Twentieth-Century Movie Magazines and Global Fandom, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 157-168.

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