Dr Margherita Laera, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre in the School of Arts, has just won Follow-On Funding for Public Engagement and Impact from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a budget of £77k to fund a project on foreign-language plays in translation, targeting secondary school students and teachers.
This project will address the issue of under-representation of cultural difference in the British secondary school drama curriculum by creating an open-access educational website of video resources to engage secondary school children with foreign-language plays. By targeting young drama students and their teachers, the project will provide training for future theatre-makers and audiences to appreciate stories from diverse contexts and empathise with culturally distant others.
Increasing representation of non-English languages and cultures on English-speaking stages is of paramount importance to foster understanding among communities in multicultural societies, such as the UK, but also in the US, where translations of foreign-language texts tend to be rare and immigration high.
The website will include newly commissioned filmed extracts of five plays in the original language and two English translations, in order to highlight how translation strategies can have an impact on the production. The videos will be entirely new and curated for the project, featuring a professional cast. The site will also include film interviews with key practitioners working in the field; extensive contextualisations of the plays by academics and theatre- makers; and teaching resources clarifying how to integrate the resource into the GCSE, A-Level, BTEC and IB curricula.
To learn more about AHRC Follow-On Funding for Public Engagement and Impact, please see the page here: https://ahrc.ukri.org/funding/apply-for-funding/current-opportunities/followonfunding/