A year after working on their pieces at the inaugural Polyphonic Multilingual Creation Residency (formerly named the Polyphonic Translation Residency), Sarvin Esmaeili and Emily Jung continue to pursue multilingual artistic projects.

Sarvin and Emily were provided with 10 days of uninterrupted time and resources to work on their respective multilingual projects-in-development Maman, do you love me? and Dead Korean Girl Comedy Show, with their residency culminating in a showcase and discussion at Progress Lab. 

"We also had the ability to choose our own collaborators, and that was really amazing. So I worked with three other Iranian female artists, where we could speak Farsi in the room. It was really magical to be able to do that without translating,  just being able to speak English and Farsi and being understood and being guided. It was a very unique experience. I feel like I had never had that experience in Vancouver or anywhere in Canada, really," Sarvin says. 

They add that through the residency, they felt permitted to present her piece fully in Farsi. Sarvin is currently archiving her work for the project, seeing where the content takes her linguistically. 

"I think it's one of those projects that's lifelong. I feel like it never ends; it's a theme that'll always be there," she says.

Sarvin is currently hard at work on two projects: Gay Ancestors, a multilingual dramedy they created with Angelic Goldsky, Chantal Gering, Rae Grant Duff, Tanaz Roudgar, and Anjalica Solomon, which will be staged at STAND Festival this November; and Hair Hair Everywhere, which will be presented at the 2025 Advance Theatre Festival.

Meanwhile, Emily and her collaborator Jenn Park were able to finish their script for Dead Korean Girl Comedy Show, presenting a 10-minute excerpt from the script's final version at Living Hyphen Magazine's Honouring the Land: A Storytelling Celebration, and present their work at Aluna Theatre's Cafe Reading Series. 

"We got to present our full script, read by friends and community members... gladly volunteering to read and celebrate the completion of the script together. We had sold out, had close to 80 people listening to the script. It was so wonderful," Emily says. 

Emily was recently featured at the 2024 SummerWorks Festival for two of her more recent projects: Festivals are Scary, Strange, and Eerie, an ongoing collaboration with Theresa Cutknife and the Seoul-based theatre group Baram Company, and is an attempt to decenter human voices in storytelling through the process of eco-dramaturgy, and X60 Tea Table, a dramaturgy conversation circle exploring Asian diasporic stories in the performing arts. The Tea Table is part of of Emily’s work with the X60 Collective, which she founded with Rinchen Dolma and Michael Caldwell.

With the loss of the 2025 residency due to funding cuts, and with fewer spaces offering specific support for multilingual development, Sarvin emphasizes that it's more important than ever to show up and support those projects. 

"You get to see an authentic side of the playwright and the creator... it's very sacred, very connected to their roots. Even if we don't understand it, just being in the room, sensing it, feeling it," Sarvin says. 

Emily also shares that theatre companies looking to be more equitable must be prepared to provide artists with more access to culturally specific labour in areas such as captioning, dramaturgy, marketing, and more. 

"It's a more holistic look at how operations for a production needs to be custom, to be changed in a customized way, in order to support multilingual work to their fullest. [...] So I think it's also about advocating for more resources to be available in the arts sector as a whole. If we really see Canada as this diverse country, and we see arts as something that should be inclusive, then I think we have to fight for the resources that allow us to really meaningfully do that, and that includes supporting things like the Polyphonic residency," Emily says.

rice & beans theatre hopes to launch applications for the 2026 Polyphonic Multilingual Creation Residency in summer 2025.