This was staged as a rehearsed reading at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2004, and it has been taken up in other countries since then. The play was translated by Sasha Dugdale with the title Oxygen in a version which remained remarkably true to the original while preserving its musicality.
Vyrypaev grew up in Eastern Siberia but moved to Moscow, and in his late twenties he saw his play Kislorod (Oxygen) premiered by one of the few independent theatre companies there, Teatr.doc. In this case study we show how one of the best-known Russian plays of this century still encounters hurdles in reaching British audiences, and investigate how translation can grow into transposition, to give a foreign text new life in entirely different cultural contexts.Ħ The Russian playwright Ivan Vyrypaev (born 1974) came to prominence in Moscow early in the twenty-first century as a leading figure in the ‘New Drama’ movement, which has shaped the most inventive and courageous theatre-making in Putin’s Russia. The Creative Multilingualism project has provided an ideal framework for such an investigation, allowing us to contextualize this undertaking more broadly and to understand the role languages play in the creative economy, and their significance for performance. On Oxygen Julie Curtisĥ As an informal group of researchers, we have been working for some years now to explore the impact academic interventions can have in facilitating the staging of contemporary Russian drama in Britain. Instead, we offer perspectives on the original play through translation and adaptation, a process which led to eclectic collaborative research and the development of Oxygen through UK hip-hop theatre.
What we offer, then, is not a linear or uniform diary of our events. Rajinder Dudrah introduces the genre of grime, with part of its antecedents in rap and hip-hop, and reflects on the process of collaboration in putting together an artistic enterprise as a thinking and doing piece in the creative industries. Noah Birksted-Breen presents an account of the challenges and possibilities of taking up the form, ideology and musicality that Curtis and Bullock describe, particularly in re-imagining these for contemporary UK audiences. Philip Ross Bullock provides an analysis of the language and musicality in the play, alongside its ‘Russian-ness’, as the musicality allows another entry point for different languages to exist, be spoken and performed alongside each other. Photograph by Katy Terry (2018), CC BY-NC.Ĥ In what follows, Julie Curtis offers a contextual overview of Oxygen and its importance not only in Russia but also beyond, highlighting the versatility that makes the play particularly well suited to translation and contemporary interpretation. Reproduced by kind permission of Noah Birksted-Breen, Rajinder Dudrah, Liam Lazare-Parris aka Stanza Divan and Sherelle Robbins aka Lady Sanity. 2 Left to right: Lady Sanity, Rajinder Dudrah, Stanza Divan and Noah Birksted-Breen at a Q & A following the Research and Development performance of Oxygen at Birmingham City University, 11 October 2018. In their performance, they played with greetings from different languages, and drew on patois via a Rastafarian frame of reference, further energized through their spoken-word art form.ģ This provided a lightbulb moment for Julie Curtis and Noah Birksted-Breen, who looked at each other, and wondered what would happen if they introduced such artists to Ivan Vyrypaev’s work… The initial moment of inspiration eventually led to artistic collaboration with the two UK hip-hop artists Lady Sanity and Stanza Divan from Birmingham and Leicester respectively, culminating in a performance on 11 October 2018 at Birmingham City University.įig. 1 How might a Russian play be translated and adapted through hip-hop and related genres on the British stage? What might such a process reveal about doing creative multilingualism beyond conventional language learning contexts, and via collaboration between scholars and artists in the creative industries? Our chapter explores how these questions emerged, and how the act of translating, adapting and performing the Russian play Oxygen came about.Ģ The idea for re-working Oxygen through aspects of UK hip-hop and grime occurred during an event organized by Rajinder Dudrah, which brought the rap, hip-hop and grime artists RTKal, Ky’Orion and Royalty from Birmingham to perform at Oxford’s Taylor Institution in 2017.
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