Words are powerful, but what happens when they disappear? Of the 350-plus First Nations languages thriving before colonisation, fewer than 50 are widely spoken today.
While more than 300 languages are spoken in Australia today – about 20 per cent of Australians are multilingual – many of those introduced post-European settlement have also been lost across generations.
St Martins Youth Arts Centre artistic director Nadja Kostich (left) and playwright Michele Lee.Credit: Joe Armao
In The Word, the latest play from St Martins Youth Arts Centre, two rival clans come together to save the world. They try to do so by overcoming prejudices ingrained through centuries of linguistic misunderstanding, which underlines the power of words.
One of the South Yarra-based youth theatre group’s most ambitious productions, the show reimagines the Abbotsford Convent – a fraught historical space where “wayward” young women were forced into indentured labour – as an abandoned archive.
“We talk about words as vessels, as containers, and so they carry form,” says St Martins’ artistic director and CEO Nadja Kostich, who also directs the show. “They carry our culture, our connections to place and family, and we sail them out into the future.”
Between the cast and crew, there are connections to 30 languages, either spoken daily or ancestrally, including Yorta Yorta, Arabic, Hebrew, Kanien’keha (the language of the Mohawk people), Gaelic and Mandarin. Kostich was born in Belgrade and speaks Serbian but says: “I’m a little bit devastated that I haven’t been able to hand it on to my children.”
The cast of ‘The Word’ during rehearsals.Credit: Jason Cheetham
These breakages haunt The Word. “There is yearning, in the piece, around ghost languages and the inability to make connections,” Kostich says.
The idea was born during lockdown, when words were all we had to stay connected and the St Martins team had to deliver workshops online to teenagers missing – and often craving – formative experiences. “It was a really dark period for them, and this work was their way of digging for light,” Kostich says. “They had control over it.”
Hmong-Australian writer Michele Lee helped shepherd the young cast through an 18-month process, funnelling from free-flowing thoughts to The Word. Engaging with St Martins as an emerging writer, her short play Love was staged by the company in 2009.
Lee only ever learnt to speak, not write, Hmong. Originally an oral language, it was adapted into a written form by missionaries in Laos. “There’s this tension between the language I’ve inherited from my parents, who through a history of imperialism and war, landed here in Australia, and English, which has become a beautiful tool that I can use,” Lee says. “But there’s also the disempowerment of English as an invading force.”
Can words change the world? This play suggests it might just be possible.Credit: Jason Cheetham
The Word actively engages with the linguistic push and pull Lee, Kostich and the young actors experienced. “There’s this wrestle of needing to speak and not knowing how to shape that voice,” Lee says.
The idea of depicting two gangs was a light-bulb moment. “You’re rubbing up against that idea that life isn’t about binaries, but it adds dramatic shape and tension,” Lee says. “They’re both right, and they’re both wrong, to the extent that they’ve forgotten the origins of why they’re fighting. Words have become entrenched, but they help them understand this heightened world with an unusual flavour.”
Lee says her early engagement with St Martins helped connect her to a sense of self she can see occurring among the young performers, her co-creators. “This is a new generation of storytellers, and whether they want to become theatre makers or accountants, it’s been inspiring to hear their struggle and eloquence.”
We all navigate the world through story and narration, Lee says. “That’s just how we connect, forming relationships and our identities, and these skills are incredibly important.”
The creative pathway St Martins offers faces an existential threat, as the company missed out on Creative Australia funding for the second consecutive time. Kostich says the company is rallying alongside the similarly defunded La Mama Theatre.
“Where do the decision makers think future artists are going to come from? Can they not see that the foundations will crumble if organisations like us and La Mama do not survive?”
Kostich fears “small but mighty” companies are slipping through the cracks because of a myopic focus on bums on seats more easily attracted by larger organisations. How many voices, she asks, risk being silenced like forgotten languages?
“The measure here is the depth,” Kostich says. “We work over many years. It’s weekly, it’s monthly, it’s across a decade. This is so important because it affects and impacts one human for their entire lifetime, and I don’t think I’m being grandiose here.”
The Word is at the Abbotsford Convent until May 26, stmartinsyouth.com.au
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