Workshop: Between Languages

28.10.2024, 10 am – 5 pm, Refugio Berlin

The workshop is facilitated by:

Sivan Ben Yishai (Israeli-born playwright who writes her plays for the German-speaking theater in English, but has them translated into German and also considers the German translation to be original)

Barbora Schnelle (translator from the Czech Republic who translates between Czech and German in both directions)

Venue: Refugio, Berlin, Lenaustraße 3-4, 12047 Berlin

28 October 2024, 10.30 am – 5:00 pm

We live in a multilingual society, but we still insist on a hierarchical classification of the individual languages that we speak and talk about mother tongue, language of origin, second or third language. This designation also goes hand in hand with certain roles or competencies of the languages. In which languages should or may one write or translate? Who determines these, and why? And how do the languages influence each other? How does the mediation between several languages in one body work? What creative energies are released here, what contexts are served?

And how do collaborative processes between writers and translators work if the authors do not understand the target language of the translation? How can one’s own work be presented transparently or the translation approach explained? The starting point for this workshop day is the collaboration between Barbora Schnelle and Sivan Ben Yishai, who both work in multilingual and collaborative contexts.

Programme (with lunch soup and coffee break):

10:30 – 11:00 Arrival

10:30 – 12:30 Morning block with a performative impulse reading by Sivan

— 12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break —

13:30 – 15:00 Afternoon block: Languages, theater, performativity. Topics that were worked out in the morning block will be included

— 15:00 – 15:30 Coffee break —

15:30 – 17:00 Open final round: We welcome the participants to share their experiences or texts.

Working language/s:

The workshop will happen in a fluid code-switching mode in German and English.

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Barbora Schnelle is a Czech-born theater translator, dramaturge, theater critic, cultural manager and editor. She studied theater studies and aesthetics/cultural studies in Brno, Berlin and Vienna. In 2001, she completed her PhD at the Institute of Theatre Studies at Masaryk University in Brno with a thesis on Elfriede Jelinek’s plays (as a book: Elfriede Jelinek a její divadlo proti divadlu/Elfriede Jelinek und ihr Theater gegen das Theater, Brno, 2006) and worked here as a university assistant. She is co-founder of the “Internet theater magazine of factual rage” Yorick. She has been living in Berlin since 2001, working as a freelance translator (plays by Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Werner Schwab, Maxi Obexer, Kathrin Röggla, Mehdi Moradpour, Wolfram Lotz, Sivan Ben Yishai and others into Czech and plays by Roman Sikora, Eva Prchalová, Kateřina Rudčenková, Tomáš Dianiška and others into German). In 2009, together with Antje Oegel, she founded the association “Drama Panorama: Forum for Translation and Theater”, where she has been organizing events and workshops ever since. In 2014, she founded the festival of new Czech drama “Ein Stück: Tschechien” in Berlin, which she has been directing and curateing ever since. She teaches as a guest lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno and Humboldt University in Berlin. Her anthology of contemporary Czech drama, Von Masochisten und Mamma-Guerillas, was published by Neofelis Verlag in 2018.

Sivan Ben Yishai is a playwright and director from Israel who has lived in Berlin since 2012. Her plays are widely performed on German-speaking stages and have been awarded several of the most important German theater prizes. She was invited to the Mülheim Drama Prize 2020 with the play LOVE/An argumentative exercise, which was created as part of her residency at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. For WOUNDS ARE FOREVER (Self-Portrait as a National Poet), which deals with Palestinian-Israeli-German history, she received the Mülheim Drama Prize 2022. For her play Nora oder Wie man das Herrenhaus kompostiert, a socio-critical examination of Ibsen’s Nora, she received the Mülheim Drama Prize 2024.

In 2023, she was awarded the Berlin Theater Prize. This was the first time the prize was awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to German-language theater without writing in German.

With her play Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa) in a production by the Münchner Kammerspiele (director: Pınar Karabulut), she was already invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2022 and was represented again in 2023 with Nora. A Thriller by Sivan Ben Yishai, Hendrik Ibsen, Gerhild Steinbuch, Ivna Žic (director: Felicitas Brucker). Her plays are translated into German by Maren Kames and Gerhild Steinbuch and into Czech by Barbora Schnelle, among others.

Artistic Direction and Production Management: Henning Bochert and Barbora Schnelle

Production: Drama Panorama: Forum für Übersetzung und Theater e. V.

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Supported by the German Translators Fund.