EVENTS

Online Lecture by Kasia Lech 

27 October 2026, 6:00–8:00pm CET (5:00–7:00pm UK, 1:00–3:00pm ET)

Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre

Multilingualism reflects and permeates pasts, present(s), and futures in Europe, acting as a nexus of survival and extinction, empowerment and violence, shaped by diverse histories and power relations.

Today, opportunities for multilingual encounters across Europe are multiplying and diversifying at unprecedented speed. These developments are facilitated by contemporary technologies, affordable travel, and migration, as well as by humanitarian crises within and beyond Europe’s geopolitical borders, as people flee global and local conflicts, economic instability, and the climate crisis. Within these changing circumstances, urgent questions emerge about Europe: its countries, peoples, imaginaries, histories, presents, and futures. Central to these questions is the place of otherness and the ways in which difference is perceived, negotiated, and represented.

In my talk, I examine how theatre artists across Europe have used multilingualism over the past decade to engage critically and creatively with difference. I consider how multilingual performance challenges fixed identities and inherited divisions, and how it imagines paradigms of coexistence beyond the oppositional logic of “us” and “them.” I also propose conceptual and analytical tools for understanding these practices and their political, ethical, and aesthetic implications.

BIO: Kasia Lech is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and a scholar-practitioner working across acting, storytelling, dramaturgy, and puppetry. Her work explores the intersections of theatre and performance with multilingualism, translation, migration, verse, and artistic research. She holds a PhD from University College Dublin, has performed internationally, and co-founded Polish Theatre Ireland, a multilingual theatre company based in Dublin.

She has authored several works on multilingual theatre, performance, and training, including the award-winning monograph Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre (Springer, 2024). Kasia also published Dramaturgy of Form: Performing Verse in Contemporary Theatre (Routledge, 2021), acclaimed for its critical quality and decolonising scholarship on verse, and Feminist Imagining in Polish and Ukrainian Theatres, co-authored with Ewa Bal (Cambridge University Press, 2025). All three books engage with multilingual practices and examine how theatre performs, negotiates, and reimagines linguistic and cultural difference.

Kasia is Executive Director of TheTheatreTimes.com, an award-winning global theatre portal committed to decolonising theatre criticism, and an affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University and Freie Universität Berlin. She has over twenty years of conservatory and university teaching experience across the UK, Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands.

Alongside her academic and artistic work, Kasia has collaborated extensively with communities, cultural organisations, schools, and children in every country in which she has lived. In Amsterdam, she contributes her expertise in multilingualism, theatre, storytelling, and theatre for children to OBA Oosterdok, Polish Culture NL, and Stichting Pools Centrum voor Onderwijs en Cultuur Lokomotywa, leading Polish-language storytelling and drama activities for children and families.