Language City: Five Nights, Five Boroughs

A series of performances about the past, present, and future of the world’s most linguistically diverse city. Each evening will explore a different New York City borough, led by speakers of endangered, Indigenous, and minority languages speaking about their communities in their own words and in their own languages, alongside poetry, music, and movement, with texts based on the Ross Perlin’s LANGUAGE CITY: THE FIGHT TO PRESERVE ENDANGERED MOTHER TONGUES IN NEW YORK. A multilingual soundscape will draw on ELA’s digital language archive, with its recordings in over a hundred languages, as well as visual elements from languagemap.nyc and creative translanguaging translation strategies. Conceived by Ross Perlin, Daniel Kaufman, Michael Leibenluft, the Endangered Language Alliance, and Gung Ho Projects. Directed by Michael Leibenluft.