rice & beans theatre’s Polyphonic Multilingual Creation Residency Showcase encourages language exploration
May 30 event features excerpts and discussion of multilingual works by Latinx playwright Yulissa Campos and Anglo-Japanese playwright Carolyn Nakagawa
Yulissa Campos. Photo by Kenton Doupe
rice & beans theatre presents their Polyphonic Multilingual Creation Showcase featuring Anne’s Cradle by Carolyn Nakagawa, and I, Frida by Yulissa Campos at Progress Lab 1422 or online via livestream, on May 30 at 7 pm
SASKATOON-BASED PLAYWRIGHT Yulissa Campos’s forthcoming work, I, Frida, is a coming-of-age story with a Latin flavour, a tale about a refugee girl who lands with her family in the Canadian Prairies. The play, in development, is in Spanish and English, with Campos being the 2024 out-of-town resident-artist of Vancouver-based rice & beans theatre’s Polyphonic Multilingual Creation Residency Showcase. Being able to incorporate her native tongue into the piece is a gift, as well as the kind of opportunity she hopes to see more of.
“It’s been a dream come true,” says Campos, an Ecuadorian-Canadian theatre artist who is the founding artistic director of Ay, Caramba! Theatre, the first Latinx theatre in Saskatchewan. “When I started writing I, Frida in 2019, I did it with one thing in mind: to give space to Latinx artists on the Prairies stage. There aren’t many opportunities for artists of colour, so I wanted to put people like me on stage. I wanted to embrace my mother tongue and create work that celebrates multiculturalism. Now, I get to rewrite this play from a place of appreciation and understanding that it’s okay and possible to create multilingual art in Canada. I don’t need to conform to the Eurocentric traditional theatre. Being part of this residency means that my culture, people, and language matter.
“This residency is so vital for artists that are trying to keep their language alive,” Campos tells Stir. “We live in a globalized world where immigration is at its highest level. Canada is becoming a multiracial land that eventually, in a few years, seven out 10 people will have roots from overseas. They will have family members who speak another language besides English. We will have second- and third-generation Canadians trying to find their cultural identity. This is why this residency is so important for the community. It gives space to those generations to see people like them on stage; it gives them hope that their language and culture can prevail. And for those first-generation Canadians, it may give them a sense of belonging.”
The Polyphonic Multilingual Creation Residency Showcase follows 10 days of workshopping and project development. It’s a chance for multilingual artists to work in a pressure-free environment and receive feedback from an audience, with time for talkback after the presentation of excerpts of their plays in progress. There will be surtitles and ASL interpretation.
The program’s Vancouver artist-in-residence is Carolyn Nakagawa, who will be sharing excerpts of her Japanese and English work Anne's Cradle. It tells the story of Hanako Muraoka, the first person to translate the Canadian classic Anne of Green Gables into Japanese.
Carolyn Nakagawa. Photo by Javier Sotres
“Hanako’s skill as a translator came not only from her ability to understand English, acquired from her Canadian teachers, but from her ability to realize the magic of stories like Anne in Japanese,” says Nakagawa, a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian poet and playwright. “It is, on one important level, a play about the Japanese language; I think even for audiences who don't understand Japanese, they still need to be able to experience and appreciate the language in some way, in order to really understand the story in full.
“Working in another language multiplies the complexity of a piece and the amount of resources needed to create it,” she continues. “It's not unlike the difference between a play and a musical. There are theatre companies that specialize in musicals, but rice & beans is a leader in supporting the special needs of multilingual works. Canada is one of many multilingual countries in an increasingly interconnected world; we need to create more multilingual art that can travel across borders without relying on the dominance of English.”
The multilingual residency is the first of its kind in western Canada. rice & beans theatre has a mandate of providing a platform for the creation, development, and production of boundary-pushing theatre by artists of colour or otherwise marginalized theatre-makers, by providing dramaturgy, direction, and mentorship. Anjela Magpantay, rice & bean’s interim artistic director, says that with Polyphonic, the company wanted to focus on the process of language and translation exploration, and how that contributes to hybrid culture in Canada.
“Art creation as a playwright can be a lonely process,” Magpantay says, “and so that is why we wanted to have multiple artists workshopping their multilingual plays to also discover common ground that all artists feel when grappling with language and culture translation.
“The geographical situation of Vancouver is an incredible opportunity for visitors and residents alike to explore various cultures, food, and languages,” she adds. “It is a wildly diverse city, and theatre performances in various languages is another cultural window waiting to be opened.” 
Related Articles
