Investigating the Phenomenon of Multilingual Acting
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“In Unknown Languages”: Investigating the Phenomenon of Multilingual Acting by Artem (Art) Babayants A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Artem Babayants 2017 “In Unknown Languages”: Investigating the Phenomenon of Multilingual Acting Art Babayants Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies University of Toronto 2017 Abstract 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. ii 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. iii Acknowledgments There is no one I would like to thank more than my supervisor, Kathleen Gallagher, who gave me, explicitly and implicitly, numerous lessons on pedagogy, research methods, thesis writing, dedication, time management, and academic life in general. Thank you also for not cutting me any slack and pushing me to reject any possibility of mediocrity even when I, myself, thought I was suited for nothing but the sheer average. My second share of thanks goes to my committee members and my thesis appraisers. First—to Antje Budde for getting me tragically hooked on German post-dramatic theatre, which nourished my research and my understanding of what theatre could be, as well as for constantly challenging my cultural assumptions about absolutely everything, including myself. Second—to Andrew Houston for jumping on board last minute and coming all the way from almost ‘far away’ to see and support my artistic and scholarly exploration. Finally—to Tamara Trojanowska and Patrick Leroux for the critical engagement with my work, your questions and queries during my thesis defence. Next, my gratitude goes to everybody working at my home department—the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, affectionately known as DC—and to all my instructors at the University of Toronto but particularly to Bruce Barton, whose almost unreasonable passion for practice-based research was too contagious not to be picked up. I am also grateful to DC’s former director Stephen Johnson, whose gentle but insistent nudging led me to doing my doctorate at DC and not anywhere else. Another major thank you goes to Rebecca Biason and Paul J. Stoesser, whose timely help made it possible for the practical part of my research to go swimmingly—a state that is near impossible to achieve in theatre. I would also like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), whose financial support allowed me to live above the poverty level for three years of my graduate studies. This dissertation would have never been completed without the SSHRC Canada Research Scholarship I received in 2011. I am equally indebted to Jane Freeman for her guidance in grant application writing—a skill that allowed me to go through graduate school without accumulating a shameful amount of debt. iv ,dankon, obrigado ,مرکشتم ,A big merci, спасибо, gracias, 谢谢 고맙습니다 is due to all my research participants but especially to the twelve brave souls who had the courage to perform our marginally insane and severely under-rehearsed theatre experiment to a live audience. Thank you also Gabrielle Houle and Justin Blum for your time, creative energy and ideas. Without you, “In Sundry Languages” would have been a lot less interesting… at least for me. A very big and culturally problematic abrazo goes to Shelley Liebembuk for being an incredibly loyal comrade-in-arms and for sustaining our effort to write even when the writing gods would clearly turn away from both of us. Thank you also to Sasha Kovacs and Noam Lior for being writing buddies and for nourishing both our writing meetings and our frequent whine- and-whimper routines. I am eternally obliged to Chelsea Dab Hilke, Giorelle Diokno and Vlade Shestakov, whose magic powers helped me tame the most obnoxious amounts of data in the shortest time possible, to Olesya Falenchuk, who patiently guided me through the depth of Nvivo without laughing at my half-witted questions, and to Cheryl Fretz, who made herself available for some serious editing help, even in the seemingly impossible times of Toronto FanExpo 2016. I am also very grateful to Robert Kohls and Rachael Cayley for providing professional and moral support when my writing went all awry and my patience with myself wore thin; to Nicole Nolette for being la seule flamme jumelle sharing my keen and slightly unhealthy interest in Canadian multilingual theatre; to Vedran Dronjic for our scholarly discussions about linguistics and for our unscholarly rants about the tragic imperfection of the world we live in; to Paulo Ravecca for showing me what it means to be dedicated to one’s academic writing as well as teaching me how to use words ‘unpack’ and ‘epistemology’ in one sentence without having an existential giggle; to Merrill Swain, Marina Engleking and Mimi Masson for running the sociocultural theory study group (SCOLAR) and for allowing me to eventually betray sociocultural theory by bringing Husserl’s phenomenology to the table; to Andrew Wilson and Danielle Potvin at the appropriately-named Gesund clinic for restoring my ability to type, sit, stand and think without too much excruciating pain. v Ensuite, j’ai plein de mots doux pour Michel Coulombe qui ne m’a pas abandonné quand je suis devenu complètement fou à cause de mon écriture interminable. Merci pour ton humour, tes sourires et ta patience. PhD, c’est pas pire, hein ? Attache ta tuque ! And last but not least, моим дорогим родителям, моей сестре, моему племяннику и племяннице— շնորհակալություն ! vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ vii List of Tables ............................................................................................................................... xii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. xiii List of Appendices ...................................................................................................................... xiv CHAPTER 1 ................................................................................................................................... 1 “In Unknown Languages”: Situating my Research ........................................................................ 1 The “Characters” .......................................................................................................... 1 Research Context(s) ...................................................................................................... 3 The personal. ............................................................................................................. 3 The scholarly. ........................................................................................................... 5 The political. ............................................................................................................. 7 The aesthetic. .......................................................................................................... 11 Conceptual Framework: Language, Body, Acting, Spectating… and Interdisciplinarity ...................................................................................................................... 18 Connection