The Theatre Times: There are more people in the world who are either functionally bilingual or multilingual than those who are monolingual. While many English people go through life assuming the world will be translated for them, that there will always be someone nearby who speaks your language, it is more common for people to hop from tongue to tongue as the situation requires.
5 comments:
The Double Life seems like a really interesting play. It takes on quite the challenge of pointing out an ongoing situation that more people in the world experience than don't. I feel like I am among the people who don't experience this situation of language switching, as I only know English, but would love to see this play even though I would understand little to none of the words being spoken. I feel like there is a group of people who upon realizing that they wouldn't understand the words, would simply be frustrated and leave never understanding the point of the show. I really love the message that Maike Lex is trying to get across by insisting on a lack of subtitles. It seems like a message that is equally relevant all around the globe, even if the play cannot be understood in many countries which in my mind makes it all the more impactful. I hope I get the chance to see this show, with or without translations.
The linguistic concept of this play is incredible intriguing to me, and presents an important topic: the English language has been so widely adopted (colonialism definitely played a large part in that), that English speakers generally find complacent comfort in the fact that a lot of media, performances, places in general, will cater to their linguistic needs. That is not the case for most other languages, especially ones not spoken as much. So, the fact that your understanding of this play is inherently based on how many languages you have been exposed to or understand to any extent is really, really interesting to me. I myself only speak English (I’ve heard my fair share of German growing up, but don’t know a single word, and took a few years of Spanish but am nowhere near fluent), so I would guess that I would struggle to follow a lot of the plot of this play. I do think tone and physical body language can say a lot about a story, but I also understand that tonal meaning in languages can be different than what I am used to.
As a multilingual person myself, I think it’s interesting to read about a play where so many languages are mixed together and subtitles are intentionally removed. I have a lot of experiences with not understanding performances due to the language barrier, which is very frustrating the majority of the time, because it’s hard to like a play where you don’t really know what is going on. I’m sure if I watched “The Double Life” I’ll be as confused as ever, but knowing that it’s purposely directed this way, I think the audiences will then try to piece together information from the action, choreography and design elements (which is what I did when I don’t understand what the actors are saying). The idea behind the piece is also interesting. The connection between language and identity is hard to define yet impossible to ignore because it’s one of the first ways we identify people – by the language they speak and whether they have an accent or not.
As a linguist, I think the exploration of identity and belonging through the manipulation and presentation of language is such a fascinating concept. This show utilizes four different languages, spoken by different actors who all play the same character, in order to portray the linguistic isolation of migrating through both many unique linguistic environments and the turmoil of the fall of Yugoslavia. In an age where we are expected to process so many words every single day, I really find it interesting how the play uses multiple languages knowing that the audience won’t be able to understand everything on stage. This environment that takes us as an audience outside of our comfort zones and our identity creates this new liminal space where the ideas of linguistic identity and belonging can be explored in our rapidly globalizing society. It breaks down the notion that we must share a language in order to communicate and understand each other, and how to navigate our own personal relationships to language.
I love work that explores language. As a person who 'leads a double life', in that I switch in and out of the two languages I know, I speak more of one language depending on the people I'm around, I grew up in a society that speaks a dialect I do not know, etcetera, this is a really provocative idea. I first saw a similar concept in the written work, Dictée, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a 'genre-bending', generational poetry memoir. It is written in English, Korean, and French, with some images throughout. The lack of understanding a language did not translate to a lack of understanding of the text as a whole. There is something very special about not understanding. The questions that this piece presents are ones that I've thought about a lot–what is a 'mother tongue'? The overlap of identity and language? 'What if you don’t speak your mother’s tongue? What if you don’t share a language with your grandmother? What if you speak it, but not well enough to express yourself? What if you are limited by your language? What if you don’t have the words to say the things you want to say?' These are all questions that I've considered, time and time again. The answer always changes, but it's a reminder of where I am in my life and where I am in the world.
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