CLAIRE FRENCH, a theatre practitioner and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at the Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology at Aarhus University, talks to actor, storyteller, dramaturg, puppeteer, and Associate Professor in Global Performance History at the University of Amsterdam, KASIA LECH. The two were speaking at the launch of Lech's new book, Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre (Palgrave, 2024).
Written in dialogue with diverse artists and their languages, Multilingual Dramaturgies argues for multilingual theatre's central role in Europe’s futures. The book reveals a complex set of negotiations involved in the creative and political tasks of staging multilingualism, as well as funding and working models. Through different theatrical, historical, cultural, and geographic contexts, the book features over 60 languages that arise from state, ethnicity, region, and disability, and it offers new ways of understanding identity in European contexts.
Hosted by Forced Migration and The Arts in association with the Performance and Migration International Working Group established and coordinated by Yana Meerzon (University of Ottawa, Canada), Steve E. Wilmer (Trinity College, Dublin), and Sheetala Bhat (York University, Canada), the book launch and conversation was held online on 8 November 2024.
Forced Migration and The Arts is an international network that brings together people with lived experience of forced migration, refugee and non-refugee artists, academics and art spaces for conversation looking at work taking place at the intersection where forced migration and the arts meet. The network, initial stages of which were developed with support from the University of Manchester’s Humanities Global Scholars Fund, hosts monthly indabas or discussion forums on the last Thursday of each month and encourages mutual support and collaboration.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
KASIA LECH with a PhD from University College Dublin is a scholar, actor, storyteller, dramaturg, puppeteer, and Associate Professor in Global Performance History at the University of Amsterdam. Her research and creative practice explore theatre through practice-based and traditional scholarship, primarily focusing on verse, multilingualism, translation, migration, dramaturgy, and cross-cultural encounters. Kasia published Dramaturgy of Form: Performing Verse in Contemporary Theatre (Routledge, 2021), and Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre (Palgrave, 2024). She performed internationally and co-founded Polish Theatre Ireland – a multilingual theatre company based in Dublin. She is an Executive Director at TheTheatreTimes.com, a global theatre portal which seeks to decolonize theatre criticism.
CLAIRE FRENCH (University of Aarhus) is a theatre practitioner and scholar who researchers and makes multilingual theatre and performance with minority or low-status languages. A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at the Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology, Aarhus University, Claire worked at University of Birmingham (UK), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and the University of Warwick (UK). She has also developed performance projects across Australia, Germany, the UK and South Africa. She recently published 'Decolonising language ideologies in the body', University of the Witwatersrand, which covers linguistically sustainable improvisational approaches to multilingual South African (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, English) performance making in monolingual institutions. Her other projects include an Arts and Humanities Research Council award for, 'Representing British Muslim multilingualism in Birmingham: Soul City Arts and the national stage' (2023-2024); a Birmingham International Engagement Fund award with Samuel Ravengai, 'Decolonising Performer Training' (2023-2024); and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship at Aarhus University (Denmark) for, 'Dramaturgies for languaging: Developing linguistically sustainable theatre and performance' (2024-2026).
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