DBLSPK: The Mother Tongue Project wraps up rice & bean theatre's online season, July 23
Jasmine Chen and En Lai Mah explore their relationship to Mandarin, through interviews, song, projections, and martial arts
Jasmine Chen and En Lai Mah.
Rice & beans theatre and Vancouver Creative Space present DBLSPK: The Mother Tongue Project on July 23 at 7 pm
MARTIAL ARTS, MOVEMENT, songs, stories, and projected Hanzi (Chinese characters) are all part of rice & beans theatre’s last online show this season.
Featuring Jasmine Chen and En Lai Mah with The Mother Tongue Project, it’s a free evening focused on multilingual storytelling—the company’s final streamed production of the year. It includes a presentation of show excerpts and a discussion with the two artists.
The Mother Tongue Project is an interview-based interdisciplinary theatre piece written and performed in both English and Mandarin. It explores how the titular subject goes far beyond first-learned languages into connections to elders and beyond. Chen explores the way she was introduced to Mandarin through the songs her grandmother taught her, and she layers live and pre-recorded singing with projections of interview transcripts with her mother—voices bearing witness to displacement and intergenerational trauma.
Mah, who is of mixed ancestry and does not speak Mandarin, reflects on how his Chinese-born father felt that it was more essential for him to learn Kung Fu than his mother tongue. Through movement and text, Mah transforms into his father Peter, who speaks of his own adoption, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and his migration to Canada.
DBLSPK is a recurring event that showcases works-in-translation or multilingual plays
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