It always feels like I’ve won the lottery when I get to go to the Glassco Residency to translate a play. Surrounded by Canadian theatre’s most fascinating polyglots and word nerds, and the writer/creators we serve…. scheming away together on how to smuggle each other’s work across linguistic and cultural borders. Surrounded by books and art and these ridiculous beauties of nature, and fed within an inch of our lives.

What separates it from a lottery is that you have to earn it, which is fine by me. And in fact, this residency – my fourth – took on a special urgency for me. There seem to be so few people active now who can walk between the worlds of French- and English-language theatre… or who care to do so. This is hardly surprising, when the fear of Québec separation has (quite wrongly, I think) faded from the national consciousness since the ‘95 referendum; when it seems to me that Québec theatre has resolutely turned its face toward Europe since that time, without most of the rest of us us even noticing; and when a shocking percentage of the world (Canada included) seems ready to shut and bolt its doors to diversity and change. It feels like everyone who has any ability to create understanding – to nurture our curiosity about the Other and our ability to see ourselves in the Other – is kind of duty-bound to do so.

All of the projects being translated have deep personal resonances for their authors, but also promise to enrich audiences in the languages they are being translated into:

• Jovanni’s A TASTE OF EMPIRE was being translated into Tagalog by Carmela Sison, who has made an even more exciting and radical discovery: she’s going to translate into Taglish, the hybrid and officially-frowned-upon Tagalog-English dialect that many Filipinos speak in daily life, and therefore PERFECT for this decolonising cooking show where a Filipino fish dish is cooked in real time! (Taglish, it would appear, is the joual of the Philippines…)
• Marilyn Perrault’s FIEL is a sensitive theatrical exploration of how a brutal prom night assault shapes the lives of all involved: Nadine DesRochers is passionate about bringing Marilyn’s fiercely feminist and inclusive vision, and exhilarating visual imagination, to an English-speaking audience.
• Anthony Black created ONE DISCORDANT VIOLIN from the bones of a short story by Yann Martel, a francophone who writes in English: Maryse Warda is carrying it home into really beautiful French.
• Finally, I was there for the first time to translate a playwright who is NOT from Québec: Vancouver’s own fransaskois theatremaker, Gilles Poulin-Denis. Gilles’ play OUTSIDE [DEHORS] is a border-crosser, too: its journalist hero’s unravelling consciousness rockets between the woodlands of rural Canada and the war-ravaged beaches of an unnamed hot country, pursued by supernatural hounds and stalked by an equally ominous bear.

I look forward to the reading of OUTSIDE at the Arts Club Theatre in September.