[Forced Migration and The Arts] Claire French, In conversation with Kasia Lech, author of Multilingual Dramaturgies Towards New European Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024). Online, Fri., 8 Nov. 2024 (3pm-5pm GMT; 4pm-6pm CET)

Europe – as a geopolitical concept, its residents, communities, and countries – is a multilingual space where people communicate in multiple languages such as Polish Sign Language, Ukrainian, Arabic, Tamazight, Spanish, Sami, Greek, and Shelta. These languages may arise from ethnicity, a country, or a region but also from disability contexts. They interact within multiple physical, geographical, socio-political, and virtual spaces, and open new possibilities for theatre.

Join Kasia Lech (University of Amsterdam) and Claire French (University of Aarhus) as they discuss Lech’s new book Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre (Springer 2024). Written in a dialogue with diverse artists and their languages, it 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. Multilingual Dramaturgies offers new ways of understanding identity in European contexts.

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NOTES

The event is hosted by Forced Migration and The Arts, and the Performance and Migration 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 group has been meeting online during the 2023-2024 academic year and has been accepted for a three-year partnership with CATR (Canadian Association for Theatre Research). It has also been accepted at the IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research). The work of the group is supported through the Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration book series co-edited by Meerzon and Wilmer.

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. Developed with support from the University of Manchester’s Humanities Global Scholars Fund, the network hosts monthly indabas or discussion forums usually on the last Thursday of each month and encourages mutual support and collaboration.