5.15pm-6.30pm Thursday 11 October 2018
Research & Development showing of Oxygen at Birmingham City University
Sputnik ran an R&D with UK rap and hip-hop artists Stanza Divan and Lady Sanity to adapt Ivan Vyrypaev’s Oxygen into a hip-hop play for UK audiences, based on the translation by Sasha Dugdale. It was presented in Birmingham on 11 October.
“The government keeps sweeping everything under the carpet,
so we have to keep lifting up the carpet.” Stanza Divan
“That’s what brings out the rawness in UK hip-hop… We’re not seeking approval or waiting for anybody else to make us sound the way we want to sound. If we don’t have the tools or the access, we’ll find a way to make it happen regardless.” Lady Sanity
You can watch a video of the event by clicking this link.
Creative team
Playwright: Ivan Vyrypaev
Translator: Sasha Dugdale
Adaptors: Lady Sanity and Stanza Divan
Director: Noah Birksted-Breen
Curator: Professor Rajinder Dudrah
Co-producers
Creative Multilingualism (Oxford University) and Birmingham City University.
Creative Multilingualism is a research programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Open World Research Initiative.
The Sponsor
The adaptation of a Russian play into the genre of British hip-hop music was supported by the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia).
Sponsors (in-kind donations)
We would also like to thank the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Punch Records (Birmingham) for their in-kind donations which played a crucial role in supporting this R&D:
Special thanks
Special thanks to Professor Rajinder Dudrah whose input and support has been essential to the evolution of this project and also to Dr. Daniel Tyler-Mctighe, who went out of his way to create the right conditions which enabled this collaboration to come to fruition.
