Looking at the many aspects of love: fraternal, romantic, passionate, and compassionate, alongside the wide array of approaches to translation and multilingual creativity, ‘Spectrums of Love’ aims to be an engaging and energetic introduction to translating poetry and monologues. Participants will be invited to respond creatively to the workshop material through their own writing, translations or performance. How might we experiment with multilingual expression to create poetry, theatre and performance?
Facilitators poet and playwright Inua Ellams and Senior Lecturer and translator Sophie Stephens will draw on multiple sources to explore the creative potential of working with multiple languages to experiment with monologues as a place where theatre and poetry meet.
This workshop will celebrate multilingualism through creativity and artistic expression, looking at love, the many types of love.
Inua Ellams will be drawing on poems from his poetry collection The Actual, poems that speak directly to different aspects of love. Sophie Stephens will be bringing extracts of the monologue Emotional Terror /Terrorismo emocional by Uruguayan writer Josefina Trías that she has translated.
At this workshop, all language levels are ‘good enough’. The session will investigate strategies for accessing and using a second language as part of the creative process while rejecting notions of fluency and linguistic hierarchies. The facilitators are interested in how a connection to a second language can inform and shape how we use English, unlocking new types of English, rich with potentialities of expression and understanding.
The different languages we speak enable new expressions and ideas to enter our realities and the workshop will ultimately focus on asking questions and unlocking possibilities. Questions about love and how we express ourselves. How can speaking multiple languages help us to better understand and express how love differs across our relationships with others?
Details
Saturday, the 9th of January 2027
Doors open at 1:00 pm for a gathering period.
Workshop from 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Address: Bloomsbury Theatre Studio, 15 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0AH
This workshop is aimed at people with access to a second language.
The workshop and all materials will be in English; participants will be invited to respond in multiple languages and multiple modes: through translation, creative writing, performing or otherwise embodying the text.
This event is part of Afro-Diasporic Theatre Across the Channel, a project supported by grants from UCL’s Grand Challenge of Cultural Understanding and the Lord Randolph Quirk Fund for Languages.
We have both full price and concession tickest available. but if the ticket price would prevent you from attening this event please contact the PTC directly atbern@poetrytranslation.org as we have a number of free places available.
Bloomsbury Theatre and Studio 15 Gordon Street WC1H 0AH
