Community Creation
Mother Tongues.
Director & Curator:
Fay Nass
a frank theatre company production
in partnership with MOSAIC and Love Intersections
Mother Tongues is a collaboration between the frank theatre, community participants, MOSAIC, and Love Intersections, resulting in an interdisciplinary theatre performance. The project works with LGBTQ+ artists and community members, addressing their experiences as people with English as an Additional Language (EAL). Mother Tongues investigates how language shapes identity, gender and sexuality, exploring notions of queerness outside of English-speaking contexts.
Language is intertwined with culture, in many cases our relationship to our mother tongue reveals how close or distant we feel from our culture. Many people feel that in order to belong to a new country, they need to speak perfect English and forget about their mother tongue. Often, the erasure of language leads to the erasure of self. The vision for this project is to celebrate the diversity of languages that one speaks, and to create space for stories that exist outside of academic and Anglophone notions of queerness.
Through this process, we are investigating the linguistic barriers that may pose danger to one’s identity and expression as a queer person. The project looks at these barriers from two different perspectives:
Queer folks who feel alienated from their first language, as their first language is not inclusive enough to talk about the spectrum of gender and sexuality and/or, it is triggering and associated with trauma.
Folks who feel that that their queer identity in so-called Canada is bombarded by definitions rooted in academia, and that English language is alienating and inaccessible and as a result queer spaces exclude them.
Mother Tongues will look at the beauty and the injury of speaking an additional language and will address the limitations and the liberations that come with existing between two languages.
—
Artistic Team
Director & Curator: Fay Nass
Facilitator: Jen Sungshine
Community Participants: Dalia Shalabi, Merlin Simard, Louis Lin, Cindy Kao, Ada Yim, Kimberly Ho 何文蔚, Elías Arce Gutiérrez, Camila Roman, Daniela Roman Torres, Tanaz Roudgar, and Angelic Proof.
Recorder: Veronique West
