Description
Founded in 1941 by a group of refugees from Vienna, the Kleines Wiener Theater (Little Viennese Theatre) entertained its predominantly German-speaking Sydney audiences with a series of Bunte Abende. These highly successful shows were delivered in a combination of ‘standard’ German, English, Austrian dialect and Yiddish, interspersed by some French, Hungarian, Italian, Russian and other ‘European’ languages. They consisted of cabaret performances that were inspired by the actors’ and their audiences’ experiences of navigating new cultural environment in (Australian) English, an initially unfamiliar idiom, to create humorous cabaret scenes and songs. When the use of German in their cultural activities, together with their status as ‘Enemy Aliens’, provoked the suspicion of the police, they successfully applied for permission to stage their cabaret evenings through astutely describing their productions’ linguistic choice as “a language such as spoken in neutral Switzerland”.My paper interprets this act of circumnavigating the rules and gently challenging authorities as characteristic of the group’s general approach of practicing quiet resistance and self-empowerment. This attitude also marks their creative use of multiple languages and instances of language contact in performance. Through a close reading of selected scenes, I will show how glosso- and semiodiversity in the Bunte Abende serve as a tool that provides the characters on stage, the actors and their audiences with agency and a humorous means of creative resistance in an unfamiliar, sometimes hostile environment.
| Period | 29 Nov 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Theatre and Internationalisation: Negotiating Mobility, Diversity and Belonging |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Sydney, AustraliaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |