In this guest contribution, performer and actor Josh Clendenin discusses how integrating and playing with multiple languages can help us experience deep embodied learning beyond space and time.
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The experience of speaking is at the core my artistic practice, but to speak a language goes much deeper than the expression of ideas. Speaking a foreign tongue or tongues allows you to be transported to a new way of being, thinking, and seeing the world. It allows you to step into another culture’s shoes, even into the land it developed on. Language can connect us to the past, whether in our own memory or a possible genetic memory.
This process of connection starts with the phenomenology of speech, that is, the immersive embodied experience of speech: we start feeling how sounds resonate in the nose, jaw, throat, and chest; then sensing the lips, the tongue and teeth move to shape those vocalizations into words. Through this somatic experience, we can connect to deeper spaces where our languages live within us: in memory, song, dance, poetry, even our own DNA, and ultimately how all of that can create story and theatrical improvisation.
Take a minute and play with these three phrases from the three primary languages I work in: English: I am (I ahm); Français (French): je suis (j swee); and Gaeilge (Irish): tá mé (taw mA). All of these phrases mean, generally, the same thing.
Now close your eyes, take a deep breath and try to say, “I am”, then « Je suis », now try “Tá mé”. Finally, find the phrase in a language of your ancestors and say it.
How did they feel, physically, emotionally, rhythmically, and what memories does it inspire? This is where my work starts.
Creators need to connect, and my practice seeks to not only connect to the audience but to help us to move past linguistic barriers. Here is where that connection dives into the past. Speaking and performing in my ancestral languages, I am trying to tap into that other world, the world of my ancestors, which is a long reach, and in that reaching I can hopefully reconnect to a past where my settler ancestors, before moving across the ocean and before christianization, were connected to the earth through the use of our own ancestral languages. Here I find roots that help connect me to a land I am now far removed from; yet, speaking and working artistically in these languages sparks life into a DNA that has lost its connection to the land it was grown in, and even more in speaking English and Français, that have no connection to the land I stand on. Here is the break from the roots, genetically and ecologically.
Through my art, I try to find a balance where I can speak in Français or English to convey a point but use Gaeilge to inspire myself and others to explore what it feels like to mouth words that your ancestors used, to connect to a land that you have lost all connection with, and hopefully, to inspire an exploration into the languages of the land people stand on.
Short Bio: Josh is an American performer and actor, who explores multilingual embodiment and language learning through performance. He completed an MFA in Theatre Practice at the University of Alberta and performs locally and internationally.