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Performance and Migration website is designed to support any researcher, student or specialist in completing literature reviews, essays, publications or more in the field of Theatre and Migration by providing an easily accessible archive of research which has been compiled and sorted into several comprehensive collections

Multilingualism

This section is devoted to multilingualism: the ability of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than one language in their day-to-day lives.1

Code-Choice and Identity Construction on Stage challenges the general assumption that language is only one of the codes employed in a theatrical performance. Sirkku Aaltonen changes the perspective to the audience, foregrounding the chosen language variety as a trigger for their reactions. Theatre is “the most public of arts,” closely interwoven with contemporary society, and language is a crucial tool for establishing order. In this book, Aaltonen explores the ways in which chosen languages on stage can lead to rejection or tolerance in diglossic situations, where one language is considered unequal to another. Through a selection of carefully chosen case studies, the socio-political, rather than artistic, motivation behind code choice emerges. By identifying common features of these contexts and the implications of theatre in the wider world, this book sheds light on high versus low culture, the role of translation, and the significance of traditional and emerging theatrical conventions. This study, encompassing Ireland, Scotland, Quebec, Finland, and Egypt, adopts a familiarizing perspective on the foreign and is valuable for those interested in theatre and performance, translation, and the connection between language and society. Although the book is not directly centered on migration, its framework is highly meaningful for analyzing the stage representation of migration.

In 2016, the Spanish Theatre Company (STC) opened the doors of its Cervantes Theatre (CT), the first British (and European) venue devoted to showcasing productions of Spanish and Latin American plays in a bilingual format. Four years on – and at a critical juncture given Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic – this article reflects on the current state and future prospects of this nascent migrant theatre initiative based in Southwark. (provided by the author)

This article draws on several Canadian plays that recount immigrant experience, and each uses untranslated minority language in some form. When looked at together, they illustrate a variety of the possible effects that using untranslated language on stage can produce. When contemplating scripting “foreign” words, or when analyzing a performance that has done so, one needs to consider how language operates in the given linguistic, social and political context of the performance at hand. In particular, if one’s aim is to use minority language as resistance to a dominant language and culture, it is necessary to be aware that the power relationship between the dominator and the dominated is constantly shifting. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The vast amount of material discussed is proficiently structured in five topical chapters: ‘The Macaronic Stage’ gives an impressive overview of mainly Western plays of different eras, and this strategy has been used to characterize ‘barbaric’ outsiders; it thus stands in the tradition of theatrical verisimilitude. Next, the author exemplifies the qualities of ‘Dialect Theatre’ in a case study on the history of Italian comedy, whereas the third chapter, ‘Postcolonial Heteroglossia’, goes even further: not only does it deal with syncretic languages such as Creole or Pidgin, but it also assesses polyglot voices in monodramatic speech acts, thus acting as a model for ‘polynational’ communities in times of global migration. The cultural and linguistic diversity of company members is a precondition for contemporary heteroglot productions discussed in the following chapter, ‘Postmodern Language Play’. Carlson’s proposals in his final chapter – such as intrafictional or simultanous translation, sub- or supertitles, and so on – are all epistemologically inspired by Ingarden’s concept of the ‘side text’, thus based on the use of supplementary linguistic sign systems. (from the review – https://login.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/speaking-tongues-languages-at-play-theatre/docview/221531915/se-2?accountid=14701 )

This book is a case study of the relationship between art and oppression. The author’s threefold experience with censorship, exile, and bilingualism has left a lasting imprint on his literary production. As he embarks on an artistic journey from censored playwright living in dictatorial Spain to bilingual exile writer residing in democratic France, his gradual employment of the French language comes to allegorize his quest for freedom of expression. (from the book jacket)

  • Grossman, E. (2016). Dwu(wielo)języczny teatr w zglobelizowanym
    kontekście brytyjskim, czyli o różnych stylach dramatu
    migracyjno-transkulturowego. Teksty drugie, 3, 60–80.     Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/td/3288

Focusing on selected bi(multi)lingual plays recently performed in the UK, the essay deals with the broader theme of intercultural communication and Polish migrants’ contribution to the local target culture. The author examines the possibility of creating a new transcultural form of theatre as an artistic means of facilitating mutual understanding and intercultural experiences. She suggests replacing the question of artistic merit by the shows’ function in reinforcing intercultural dialogue. The performances discussed are shown not only to strengthen the migrants’ integration but also to secure their feeling of emotional and cosmopolitan belonging to a globalized world without undermining their sense of human dignity and their belief in social equality. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Hauthal compares multilingual expression in Rimini Protokoll’s 100% Brussels and Jan Lauwers/Needcompany’s Isabella’s Room, arguing that both performances use language, accent, and collective performance to unsettle the idea of a unified national language or stable national identity. Through postdramatic theatre analysis, she examines how multilingual speech, post-epic narration, and “covert” forms of authority stage migration, cosmopolitanism, and cross-cultural encounter. The article is useful for thinking about how performance does not simply represent migrant identities but produces postnational frames through the sound, texture, and distribution of languages onstage. For migration studies, it offers a way to analyze multilingualism as embodied, affective, and communal rather than merely communicative.

Zhu Hua and Li Wei examine translanguaging through the lens of performance theory, asking whether multilingual practice should be understood as performance, or whether performance itself is produced through translanguaging. Drawing on ethnographic research with a London-based multilingual artist of Polish origin, the article argues that translanguaging is not simply the alternation between named languages, but an embodied and socially situated practice through which speakers negotiate meaning, identity, and belonging. Key concepts include translanguaging, performance, social interaction, multilingual subjectivity, ethnography, and embodied communication. Although the article is not specifically about theatre or migration drama, its framework is valuable for migration and performance studies because it helps analyze how migrant or diasporic subjects perform and generate identity through mixed linguistic and cultural resources. It is especially useful for reading multilingual theatre as a dynamic process of world-making rather than as the representation of individual cultures.

This article argues that the choice of non-translation as the absolute staging of multilingual hospitality carries the promise of a more radical cohabitation and offers both critical and reparative encounters with bodies that resist mainstream recuperation. Beyond multicultural accommodation of diversity, non-translation as a politicized choice is examined through examples chosen from contemporary Asian Canadian and Afro-Caribbean Canadian drama, as well as Indigenous performance. Specifically, the article analyzes the deployment of multilingualism “from below” in front of mainstream Anglophone audiences. The decolonial practice of non-translation embraced by these playwrights contributes to the trend of “diversifying diversity” and promotes more balanced linguistic ecologies. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book provides a study of dramaturgical practices in contemporary multilingual theatre in Europe. Featuring interviews with international theatremakers, the book gives an insight into diverse approaches towards multilingual theatre and its dramaturgy that reflect cultural, political, and economic landscapes of contemporary Europe, its inhabitants, and its theatres. The book illuminates not only the potential for multilingual dramaturgies, but also the practical and creative difficulties involved in making them. By bringing the voices of artists together and providing a critical commentary, the book reveals multilingual dramaturgies as webbed practices of differences that also offer new ways of understanding and performing identity in a European context. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Manole explores how an exilic actor’s foreign accent can evolve from a barrier to working in mainstage theatre to a site of simultaneously acknowledging and negotiating differences between natives and exiles. As a case study, she discusses the career of Nada Humsi, an Arab Canadian born in Syria, who reinvented herself as a hyphenated Arab-Canadian theatre artist. Manole emphasizes not only her professional but also her emotional journey, from a theatre star in her native Syria to a retail associate in a Canadian convenience store, to an actress and an Artistic Associate with the MT Space theatre company in Kitchener, and finally to one of the founders and the Artistic Producer of the Kitchener-Waterloo Arab Canadian Theatre/KW-ACT. The second part of the article analyzes Humsi’s performance in Hazim Kamaledin’s Black Spring, where she played both an Iraqi immigrant and an American journalist.

The book examines the function of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg in making a theatre performance situated at the crossroads of multiple theatre forms and performative devices. This book explores how these forms and devices are employed, challenged, experimented with, and reflected upon in the work of migrant theatre by performance and dance artists. Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theatre, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgy of Migration expresses not only the practicalities of migratory performances but also the emotional responses of the artists who stage them. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Meerzon, Y., Pewny, K., & Vannieuwenhuyze, T. (2018). Introduction:
    Migration and Multilingualism. Modern Drama 61(3), 257-270.     Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/702331

This article argues that contemporary multilingual theatre practices bring forward new “dramaturgies of self” that reflect the everyday alienation experienced by migrant theatre makers and their audiences. These experiences are often the product of different forms of global mobility: forced displacement, political banishment, the threat of war, asylum-seeking, economic immigration, and tourism. Theatre provides a space in which to negotiate these discourses via polylogues of contact between artists and audiences. These polylogues present a complex web of dramaturgical relations, propositions, and choices that reflect our multicultural encounters off stage and that each of this issue’s contributors considers in depth. (from the article)

  • Prykowska-Michalak, K., & Grabarczyk, I. (2023). “English with a
    Polish Accent and a Slight Touch of Irish”: Multilingualism in Polish Migrant Theatre. Text Matters (Łódź), 13, 298-.     Available at: https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.16

Issues of migration writing and migrant theatre have recently gained prominence, leading to an increase in research focused on analyzing the theatrical works of artists with a migrant background. This phenomenon is part of a broader trend in intercultural and, often, postcolonial studies. Contemporary Polish migrant theatre is a subject that has not been thoroughly explored yet. Among many methods applied in the study of migrant theatre, intercultural studies or the so-called new interculturalism take the lead. These concepts draw on bilingualism or multilingualism practices, which are slowly taking a more significant role in migrant theatre studies. This article analyzes two theatre plays staged by Polish migrants in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in the context of linguistic practices that exemplify and help define the concept of transnational drama. (abstract from the article)

Azadeh Sharifi examines how multilingualism functions as an aesthetic and political strategy within postmigrant theatre in Germany. The article argues that, after decades of exclusion from the German artistic sphere, immigrant and postmigrant artists used theatre to make multilingual speech visible as a form of resistance, empowerment, and spatial intervention. Sharifi traces a genealogy from Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak to the work of Ballhaus Naunynstraße, then analyzes the queer performance Frutas afrodisíacas and Mehdi Moradpour’s Mumien: Ein Heimspiel. Key concepts include postmigrant theatre, creolization of German, multilingual performance, theatrical space, and artists of colour. This source is highly relevant because it directly connects migration histories with language politics and stage practice. It will be useful for analyzing how multilingualism can challenge national theatre traditions in a European context, monolingual norms, and the marginalization of migrant subjects.

This chapter appeals to critical ethnography to focus on collaborative creative practices across cultural and linguistic differences within an intercultural theatre group in the city of Bologna (Italy). Alongside the regular Company formed of members from a range of countries, the group organises a series of open workshops aimed at migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and Italians resident in the city. Both the Company and their workshops thus involve participants with hugely diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires, reflecting distinct individual trajectories of migration and mobility. Bridging sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the chapter thus addresses the creativity and transformative potential of translanguaging practices within spaces of cultural production and exchange. (by the publisher – at the link above)

  1. European Commission, 2007: 6 ↩︎