Translanguaging and Language Creativity in Drama Staging

Abstract

This chapter presents a performative approach to translanguaging that draws on and fosters language creativity of bilingual adolescents from mixed French-Russian families living in France. Through staging scenes, the learners interact autonomously in both of their languages and co-create a fictional world. This provides learning situations that allow them to embody meaning: they improvise creatively, mixing all of the repertoires available to them, i.e. verbal, non-verbal, emotional, sensory, cultural and intellectual. The authors outline their theoretical framework, taking up Francisco Varela’s enactive perspective, which posits that languaging is a lived, i.e. embodied, dynamic and emergent, experience and they show how their approach includes the features of an enactive teaching method.