Translanguaging and Collaborative Creative Practices: Communication and Performance in an Intercultural Theatre Group

Abstract

This chapter appeals to critical ethnography to focus on collaborative creative practices across cultural and linguistic differences within an intercultural theatre group in the city of Bologna (Italy). Alongside the regular Company formed of members from a range of countries, the group organises a series of open workshops aimed at migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and Italians resident in the city. Both the Company and their workshops thus involve participants with hugely diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires, reflecting distinct individual trajectories of migration and mobility. While Italian typically acts as a lingua franca of both communication and cultural expression for both Italian and migrant participants, a feature of these activities is how those present draw collaboratively from their range of semiotic resources to communicate and produce meaning across non-shared knowledge. Drawing on observations of the Company’s workshops and an interview with its members, the chapter will illustrate how the multilingual makeup of the group encourages a flexible movement across not just linguistic but also physical resources, such as gesture and the use of objects, emphasising the multimodal realities of communication and performance in this interstitial or ‘affinity’ space. Equally, it is the flexible and collaborative nature of this space which appears to encourage experimentation with linguistic resources, allowing for the reshaping, and potentially decentering, of Italian by migrant participants who bring to bear on these encounters and performances the traces of other languages, histories and traditions. Bridging sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the chapter thus addresses the creativity and transformative potential of translanguaging practices within spaces of cultural production and exchange.