Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre

Multilingual Dramaturgies 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. First-hand accounts are contextualized to reveal a complex set of negotiations involved in the creative and political tasks of staging multilingualism and engaging the audience, as well as in practical issues like funding and developing working models. Using interviews with practitioners from a diverse range of theatrical backgrounds and career levels, and with various models of financial support, Multilingual Dramaturgies also offers an insight into different attitudes towards multilingualism in European 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. Multilingual Dramaturgies sheds light on an exciting theatre practice, argues for its central role in Europe and highlights potential directions for its further development.

Dr Kasia Lech is a scholar, actor, multilingual storyteller, puppeteer, and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Music and Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University. She holds a PhD from University College Dublin; her research was supported by the Irish Research Council. She has published on verse and verse drama in contemporary performance, theatre translation, multilingual theatre, multilingual actors, Spanish, Polish, and Irish theatres, theatre and animal rights, and puppetry. Kasia also runs a project Bubble Revolution that engages with the process of performing translation and looks at the role of non-native speaking actors in staging translation. In 2018 Kasia became an Executive Director at TheTheatreTimes.com, a global theatre portal.