We thought we’d kickstart our eleventh year (and our second decade) by launching a series of monthly blog posts, so we can share our plans for the coming month with you, as well as offer some insight into our dreams for the future.
August was an unusually busy month as we celebrated our ten year anniversary with an online festival, complete with workshops, live talks and celebratory events, where we were joined by some of our all time favourite people. Although it wasn’t the kind of celebration we’d planned at the beginning of the year, it was a true Foreign Affairs event, with contributors, participants and audiences joining us from around the globe to help celebrate ten years of theatre beyond borders. Thank you to everyone who joined us in the land of Zoom!
This month, we’re super excited to be kick-starting the fourth edition of our Theatre Translator Mentorship, which will be delivered digitally for the first time this year, allowing us to invite participants from outside the UK. For six months, we’ll be working with translators working from Dutch (Flanders), Levantine Arabic (Syria), Latvian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish and German, culminating in a public showcase in January 2021. You can read more about this year’s mentees here.
In addition to our mentorship programme, we’re excited to be piloting our new professional development initiative for translators: Foreign Affairs Theatre Translator Lab (or FATT Lab as we like to call it). The idea for the Lab came about a couple of years ago and will be a collaborative creative space where theatre translators can hone their craft in a supportive environment. We can’t wait to get started and to share more exciting details with you!
This month we’re also returning to our virtual rehearsal room to meet up with our international ensemble of performers and theatre-makers, to explore new ways of making theatre using digital tools and platforms, but also to prepare for the day we can return to physical spaces to share live theatre. At the moment, we’re dreaming of taking over abandoned commercial spaces in east London, and creating socially distanced micro performances as an ode to our early days of pop-up theatre. Would you join us?
Although live theatre is on the top of our wish list at the moment – Santa, we’ve been good this year, we promise! – we’ll be staying in our digital world for a (little) while longer. During the making of our online festival, we’ve enjoyed creating short videos, hosting online workshops and talks, as well as exploring live streaming on social media, which was slightly out of our comfort zone but a lot of fun! We hope to expand our digital content in the near future in order to give you a deeper insight into our practice. If there is anything specific you’d like to see from us in the near future, connect with us on social media or drop us a line.