Make Your Classroom Multilingual: On Training Students For Rapidly Changing Cultural Landscapes

How do we train students to work within rapidly changing landscapes and for a theatre of the future that does not exist yet and already is an accumulation of multiple things?

In my book Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre, I argue that one way of doing this, is to use multilingual contexts to support students in developing a creative and flexible attitude to their skills, so they can respond to and shape various professional, cultural, and socio-political circumstances. This is because, multilingual theatre is a radical and necessary practice that facilitates imagining and rehearsing new ways of being, experiencing, communicating, and relating to and with each other in the contemporary world.

But how can you do it without increasing your workload or accessing additional resources?

How do you do it, if you speak one language?

Here are some, mostly economically- and effort-free, suggestions.

Watch and Review Theatre Without Surtitles

As part of performance analysis – or another theatre-event related module – show a recording of a performance in a language your students (and even you) are unlikely to know. Your library may have a subscription to the Digital Theatre Plus, or other subscription-based platforms. Online archives like Polish Ninateka have theatre works available for free, including stagings of classics and productions by Krzysztof Warlikowski or Jan Klata. Some works remained online after the Covid-19 era of digital theatre; Renaissance by European Theatre Conventions is an example. And, of course, many eminent theatre works have been digitalized. Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1789 is now on DVD, and Tadeusz Kantor’s Dead Class is available on YouTube for free.

The point is that by encountering theatre rooted in a language different than their own, and without having access to the semiotic understanding of the words, you can invite your students to consider how theatre is made and performed in other contexts, and how ideas of theatre and encountering theatre – including the idea of authenticity/scenic truth – are culturally coded. Such a discussion would invite your students to voice what they do not understand, what they ‘hate,’ find frustrating, different, or even ‘bad theatre.’ What do they understand from the piece? What makes no sense? Does it remind them of anything? Through that, you can also engage them in larger discussions:

• From what do we make meanings in performance (beyond words)?
• What new understanding of theatre experiencing performances in foreign languages bring?
• Are ideas like scenic truth, good/bad, or ‘artistic quality’ stable or not?

Based on the experience above, invite your students to write a review. Who would be the audience of such a review? What is the position of a reviewer in the intercultural situation? What can they comment on? What ethical issues are to be considered? In what way does such an exercise allow them to rethink the broader role of theatre reviews?

Provide Space for Multilingual Discussions and Practices

Given that there are approximately 7,000 languages which arise from ethnicity, region, state, or disability contexts, and these languages move with people, it is likely that in your classroom students are speaking multiple languages that arise from their social and familial situations. Welcome these languages by allowing students to:

• start to talk in the language of their choice (and translate if necessary by themselves or with the help of others);
• include words from other languages when they are missing the word; they may not know the correct word in the dominating language, but it may be that such a word does not exist.

It will take time for all the students to get involved. Especially those speaking languages deemed less ‘desirable’ in your teaching context may find it more challenging to feel safe. It may feel that the discussions are taking more time. However, you will make the different meaning-makings and negotiations across languages already happening in your classroom (but in students’ heads) visible and audible. The results are worth it as they will allow your students to use their cultural, linguistic, and cognitive resources fully. Together, you will also stretch the socio-cultural-linguistic boundaries of the module.

Theatre Terms Across Languages

When introducing a term, such as ‘performance’ or ‘actor’ or ‘spectator,’ ask your students how these terms sound in their languages. This will not only welcome other languages but will also create an opportunity for discussing how different cultures and languages think about these terms. In such discussions, your students will be the experts, facilitating partners-in-learning environments in which students and lecturers work and learn together to “foster engaged student learning and engaging learning and teaching enhancement” (Healey et al., 7). A great example is the term ‘performance’ and, interconnected to it, performance studies, underpinned by what ‘performance’ means in the English-language context. To nourish the discussion, you may look at an essay by Dariusz Kosiński, who shows how the difference between the term ‘performance’ in Polish and English inspired a whole new field of studies: performatics.

You can also read some of the interviews from my book – e.g. with Rimini Protokoll or Anne Bérélowitch or SignDance Collective or Caroline Guiela Nguyen – to see how differently concepts of actors, translation and spectators operate in different linguistic contexts within international and national environments.

Analyse Classical Texts in Different Languages

This strategy builds on linguistic resources in your classroom, and you need a dramatic text translated to many languages. The Project Gutenberg provides many of such plays in many languages. Of course, this also means needing to depend on ‘canonical’ Western texts such as Antigone, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), or Hamlet. And you can have a critical discussion with your students about the reasons for such ‘dominance.’ Some contemporary plays are also published in multilingual editions, such as Magda Romanska’s Opheliamachine.

The purpose of text analysis across languages is to see how differently situated ideas are mapped upon a translation and how gaps between them allow to see the respective cultures and the text in a new way.

Last semester, for example, with the Dual Master International Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies Master students from the University of Amsterdam, I analysed La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Students could read the play in any language, and we discussed the differences in the classroom. A fascinating reflection came from the difference between Dutch-, Polish-, and English-language takes on the Day 1 king Basilio’s monologue in translations by Erik Coenen, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz and Jo Clifford respectively. ‘Dutch’ Basilio performs his power through jokes. ‘Polish’ Basilio’s performance is underpinned by suffering. Basilio, in English, is skilled in rhetoric, and his performance is more important than ethical dilemmas. Together with students, we were astounded by the critical viewpoint these differences offered on the route to power of Dutch, Polish, British, and American politicians such as Geert Wilders, Jarosław Kaczyński, Boris Johnson, or Donald Trump.

There are many alternatives to the examples above. You can also engage AI translatory tools to try to translate a play. If you have access to someone with an understanding of the source language, together you can discuss the possibilities and limits of such language encounter and the limits of translation itself. What ethical dilemma arise depending on who is present in the room? Multilingual contexts are hyper-contextual, and you and your students will bring your unique situatedness to re-imagine the suggestions above, staging multiple reflections and rehearsals for and of futures.