Displacing Practitioner: on Professional Training for Multilingual Theatre in Europe

This essay explores methods for multilingual theatre training in contemporary theatre and its implications for European theatre systems. It argues for a displacement – from one’s language, system, and culturally-framed “artistic quality” – as a core element of such training. The essay shows that multilingual theatre training goes beyond role-spe-cific techniques (voice, acting, directing etc.) and also includes skills and understand-ings related to different audiences, theatre systems, and socio-political aspects of thea-tre. The case study is the Jeune Théâtre Européen Jeunes Publics (JTEJP). This Creative Europe project involved early-career theatre artists working across multiple languages and cultural backgrounds to create new models for multilingual theatre for young and new audiences.