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Super Paua - where digital and multilingual art come together

Updated / Tuesday, 6 Sep 2022 10:08
The Super Paua team - Producer Heather Rose and Artistic Director Mark Ball (Pic: Ste Murray)
The Super Paua team - Producer Heather Rose and Artistic Director Mark Ball (Pic: Ste Murray)

Theatre company Super Paua create digital and multilingual work for young people - below, Artistic Director Mark Ball introduces their work ahead of a (virtual) appearance at this year's Dublin Fringe Festival.

How do we bring theatre and art to those who can't, or don’t come to us? This question opens up many possibilities for our work at Super Paua, an arts collective that makes work for and with young people and provides artist support.

This question was magnified for the arts sector during the pandemic. The answer for most - digital experiences. For us - digital and multilingual. We succeeded and failed in early explorations so had to ask: what could theatre practice do on digital platforms that film and TV aren’t already doing better?

We developed online creative workshops to return to spontaneous, live connections. We also created a series of audio adventures called Super Paua Stories. Workshops were enjoyed from school or home; audio stories from anywhere at any time if you have internet. We connected with thousands of young people in the last two years across the country and the world- more than we ever could have imagined!

In 2021, I started collaborating with Mother Tongues, a social enterprise supporting multilingualism and intercultural dialogue. I saw firsthand the positive impact on hearing and creating multilingual stories has on young people. This solidified the need for multilingual work: tír gan teanga, tír gan anam - a country without a language, is a country without a soul. This country has multiple languages and it’s crucial we make art that speaks to the souls of their speakers.

Our second series of audio stories was as Gaeilge. Our third series was in Polish, as Polish was the second most spoken language in Ireland in the 2016 census. This year we are creating four bilingual stories in English paired with five languages: Romanian and Romani, Portuguese (Brazilian), Gammon-Cant and Arabic.

I was delighted when Mollie Molumby approached us to collaborate on Whodunnit? The Great Art Robbery! (playing 10th & 11th September at Dublin Fringe Festival). It’s an online participatory whodunnit game, where digital and multilingual art come together- fite fuaite. Each young person will use their languages creatively and play suspicious characters with costumes found around the house. They’ll take their silliness seriously by connecting secrets and flinging accusations! One experience will be multilingual idir Gaeilge, Béarla nó aon teangacha eile (le tacaíocht ó axis:Ballymun agus Foras na Gaeilge).

There is an understable fear of making work that isn’t about you- your language, your culture, your story. But equitable, quality art can come from finding the right collaborators. Super Paua projects wouldn’t be possible without the creative teams, partner venues and organisations, and the curious, creative young people we work with, such as the multilingual students of St Mary’s Dorset Street and the young people of Laois Travellers Action Project Group.

We’ll continue to make digital and multilingual work as a company because it’s an active practice in making art more accessible. Not all young people can enjoy art because of where they live, their ability, or they don’t see themselves and their languages reflected in it.

So, the question remains: how do we bring theatre and art to those who can’t, or don’t come to us? Try. Experiment. There’s no one right answer to this question. And that’s beautifully freeing.

Whodunnit? The Great Art Robbery! is online on the 10th & 11th of September as part of this year's Dublin Fringe Festival - find out more here.

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