Multilingualism at Voila! Europe Theatre Festival
Voila! Europe is a festival which brings together European and British theatre makers. Some of the shows are bilingual or multilingual, and many include performers from more than one country. This year, the performances explored different aspects relating to Britain’s relationship with Europe with themes including history, classics, environmental issues, war and technology.
Languages play an important role in evoking the atmosphere of individual countries and cultures, and the festival explored ideas about communication in Europe as a continent where multiple languages are spoken. At the beginning of each show a recorded announcement in different European languages introduced the festival, helping to set the multilingual tone.
The show European Freaks produced by Hungarian theatre company STEREO AKT, involved a focus group of Londoners and was presented in English. Though not multilingual itself, the show dealt with issues relating to the fact that Europe is multilingual. As the audience entered, commentary on a soundtrack related fragments of information about the history and development of Europe. The actors / presenters introduced the show as a social experiment and explained that they were Euro-humanoids aiming to make Europe a better place. The audience were asked who had a European passport, and information was projected onto a screen displaying facts about Europe, including the average number of languages spoken by individual European citizens.
The focus group introduced themselves and described their occupations; one was a translator. The focus group discussed aspects of Europe such as the design of the European flag with the twelve stars. A computer design programme projected onto the screen played around with ideas for redesigning the flag. In one section the audience were given a pack of words relating to issues in Europe and were asked to construct sentences and read them out, this was integrated into the soundtrack at the end of the show.
Another show which directly addressed the themes of the festival was Rosetta Code, produced by Improbotics, with members from Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Canada and the UK. This performance was truly multilingual. The sequence on the screen at the beginning of the show introduced the theme of technology, and its relationship to multilingualism. This included diagrams and quotes such as 'The language of Europe is translation' (Umberto Eco), highlighting how technologies can help develop communication in an area with multiple languages. A little robot was displayed on stage, later introduced as Alex, the letters of his name standing for Artificial Language Experiment.
In the first part of the performance, the actors lined up and introduced themselves in different languages. A host character who introduced each section of the show explained that the show would be completely improvised, that nothing was scripted, and that real tech would be used for translations shown on the screen. In one section the robot asked the humans to communicate in different languages to make themselves understood. The audience were asked to suggest a word in English that had its origins in another language. A scene with a couple involved the girl speaking in English and a male character speaking in another language.
The show explored different uses of technologies relating to translation such as speech recognition from microphones, and radio translation directly into earpieces. Both of these shows involved the audience in ways that meant that they weren’t just passive observers.
2100: A Space Novelty with Cut Mustard Theatre involved performers from Norway, Australia, South Korea and the UK. Mostly in English with short multilingual sections, the actors played robots in the future.
Napoli 44 presented by Compagnia Francesca Caprioli was a play inspired by the book Naples ‘44 by Norman Lewis, a war diary set in Italy WWII. The show was bilingual with the main character, a young British soldier, speaking in English, and the female characters local to Naples speaking in Italian, which wasn’t translated.
Since there was a minimal set, with just cans on the floor, the use of untranslated language helped to develop the atmosphere of the cultures side by side in the location of Italy. The untranslated Italian was used in such a way that the audience were able to grasp the main story and themes of the play even if they were not familiar with the language. The use of Italian is a development from the original book published in 1978 which is mostly in English, with some Italian words and phrases, such as place names.
Mags, with Cwmni Pluen Company from Wales, was another bilingual show this time set in Wales. It featured emotive singing in Welsh and English, with scenes from the life story of a female character, Mags. In her story she searched for her home, and there was clever choreography with furniture developing a home environment.
Voila! Europe has happened every year since 2012. Originally a French and English bilingual festival, it expanded to become multilingual in 2017, in response to Brexit, and this year featured Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic and Welsh. It really was Creative Multilingualism in action.
Claire Frampton works as a gallery attendant at the Ashmolean Museum, OU Gardens, Libraries and Museums, and is enrolled on Associateship of the Museums Association. In 2013 she completed an MA Arts in Policy and Management, taking optional modules in cultural heritage management, at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Photos by Botond Bartha / Hungarian Cultural Centre London taken at Voila! Europe Festival 2019
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