“In Unknown Languages”: Investigating the Phenomenon of Multilingual Acting

Despite the growing presence of multilingual theatre in large multicultural cities like Toronto, research on stage multilingualism remains at the nascent stage, particularly in English Canada. Using the Practice as Research methodology, as proposed by Robin Nelson (2013) and the principle of interdisciplinarity (Repko 2012) this dissertation investigates stage multilingualism that does not use translation. Specifically, it focuses on multilingual actors, multilingual dramaturgy, and multilingual audiences. The artistic practice at the centre of the study involved 25 professional and amateur performers, both mono- and multilingual, who were engaged in a six-week creation period of devising scenes in their dominant, non-dominant, and unfamiliar languages. The devised scenes were later compiled into a multilingual show entitled “In Sundry Languages” and performed twice to a multilingual audience. This study first offers an analysis of the actors’ phenomenology of performing in various languages, as captured in the actors’ journals, the researcher journals, and the researcher’s post-performance interviews with the actors. Second, it reveals the specifics of the dramaturgical devices of “In Sundry Languages” through the show’s script and video recording. Finally, through a qualitative analysis of 182 post-performance audience surveys, the study shows a vast diversity of audience responses to the presence of multiple languages on stage. Using Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (2006) as its theoretical framework, the study conceptualizes untranslated stage multilingualism as a queer object which has the potential to cause re-orientation (or queering) of the subject, especially a monolingual subject. It also investigates how and why certain multilingual subjects (both actors and audiences) may challenge dominant monolingual frameworks, relying on a clear distinction between one single mother tongue and additional languages. Finally, the study proposes multilingual dramaturgy as “diversity work” (Ahmed 2014), confronting the monolingual paradigms of Toronto’s mainstream theatre.Ph.D.2019-11-01 00:00:0