Language Exchange

To speak a language other than our own is to change our personality, to think in different ways, and to find other perspectives on the world. It is a landscape that opens up inside our mouths, sounds that we didn't know they held. The language exchange happened constantly. We worked and communicated in many languages during the first year, learning short phrases and words in Portuguese, Hindi, Nepali, and Bangla. Experimenting with the language of others makes room for ridicule, and this vulnerability is a form of encounter. In the first performance there was the 'forest of misunderstanding', in which young people - from India (Meet Patel), Punjab (Gursanj Kaur and Arshpreet Kaur), China (Daniel Wang), Bangladesh (Syed Rahman) and Nepal (Sushant Adhikari) - standing on mansory tables in a forest met the audience and gave short lessons in their languages, asking them to repeat and write the phrases on slates. From the second year onward, the sessions concentrated on language exchange with a focus on the Portuguese language. In BOWING BACK, we sang in Nepali, Punjabi, Bangla, exchanged phrases and translated texts into all the languages present. Indian men spoke in Portuguese, Portuguese children sang in Nepali. We all found the foreign inside our mouths. There were many misunderstandings. There were conflicts and countless corrections. Speaking a language that is not your own brings risks - it is entering an unknown territory. But when you take that step towards others without hostility, they welcome you in the same way. In a session with the artist Margarida Mestre - who created the choir for BOWING BACK - we came up with the expression DENA-LENA in Hindi (GIVE and RECEIVE). In this way, we made languages our currency of exchange.