Announcing the 2025 Out of the Wings Forum, 15 July at King's College London

Tuesday, 15 July 2025, 10:30-17:00BST

Macadam Building MB2.2, Kings College London WC2R 2NS

OOTW Members Sophie Stevens and Catherine Boyle welcome guests to the OOTW Forum 2023

As part of the 2025 Out of the Wings Festival, Out of the Wings is once again coming together with Language Acts and Worldmaking to offer a one-day discussion forum aimed at theatre translation practitioners and researchers. As always, anyone with an interest in international theatre-making and cross-border and cross-language collaboration is welcome to join us for this free event. Booking is open now via this link.

A small amount of funding has been allocated for freelance translators, actors and creative practitioners to cover expenses and/or lost earnings due to attending.  Please contact Sophie Stevens (sophie.stevens@sas.ac.uk) about this.

Taking place on Tuesday 15 July at King's College London's central London campus and timed to coincide with the opening day of the Out of the Wings Festival (15–19 July 2025), the Forum will set the scene for a week of play readings from Latin America, Portugal, and Spain, presented in English translation every evening at Omnibus Theatre.

This year’s Forum, ‘Worldmaking on Stage: Hearing Each Other’ explores how we hear translation. Our contributors consider questions around the soundscapes of translation, the role of actors, directors, producers and audiences in hearing translation, the ways in which we create systems, communities and networks of translators through mutual listening and how hearing and listening create collaborators.

Chaired by members of the OOTW team, the Forum will feature talks and conversations with representatives of theatre-making, translation and research, including speakers from Foreign Affairs Theatre Company, DASH Arts, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of the Arts London and the University of East Anglia.

Attendance at the OOTW Forum is free but booking is requested via this link.

Supported by: Languages, Literatures and Cultures, King’s College London; School of Advanced Study, University of London; Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking, Global Cultures Institute.

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‘World making on Stage: Hearing Each Other’ Programme:

10.30: Registration and Refreshments

11.00: Welcome from Out of the Wings

11.15-12.45: Panel 1: 'Hearing in Practice'

Moderator: Catherine Boyle

Almiro Andrade: ‘Re-imagining melodrama and counter-colonial approaches to actor training’

Amalia Ortiz de Zárate: ‘Spanglish theatre en tu colegio’

12.45-14.00: Lunch provided with registration; includes vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options

14.00-15.15: Panel 2: 'Hearing during the Theatre-Making Process'

Moderator. Camila González

Kotryna Garanasvili: ‘Dialect in theatre translation’

Rita Júlia Sebestyén: ‘In between: community writing and collaborative devising’

15.15-15.30: Break

15.30-17.00: Panel 3: How Audiences Hear Translated Work

Moderator: Kate Eaton

MA students from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama: Nicolas Lamy, Margo Lebioda, Sama Sabagh, Natalie Schmidt, Nishita Subramanyam: ‘Staging against English, the global lingua franca’

Josephine Burton: ‘Translating memory: bilingual storytelling in The Reckoning’

Trine Garrett: ‘Staging plays in translation as cross-cultural practice’

17.00: Forum Closes

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The OOTW Forum is the opening event of the OOTW Festival 2025. It will be followed on the evening of July 15 with a staged reading at Omnibus Theatre of 'Firefly Love' by the Mexican playwright Alejandro Ricaño, translated by Tonya Walton, the first of five evenings of readings of UK-premiere English translations of plays from Ibero-America. For full details of the readings, click here.