The Event

Join rice and beans theatre society on Sunday, July 7th at 7:30pm at Progress Lab 1422 for a work-in-progress showing of a new multilingual work by Olivia Etey, featuring Hungarian and English, followed by an artist/audience discussion!

Tickets are pay-what-you-can, with a suggested price of $10. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds.

ASL interpretation will be available for the reading & discussion in-person. ASL Vlog to Come!

The Project

Two first-generation Hungarian sisters, Ana and Emmeline, live almost identical lives until Ana travels to Hungary to become a professional Hungarian Folk Dancer and Emmeline starts raising a family in Canada. This play chronicles their reunitings over the course of 6 years, until the last one. It is also a love story about a Csikós.

The Playwright

Olivia Etey is a playwright, producer and the creator of the Or Festival, an annual 10 minute play festival in Vancouver (www.orfestival.com). Its mandate is to build a bridge connecting the Deaf and Hearing Theatre Communities across Canada. She graduated from UBC with a double major in Creative Writing and English Honours. Her plays include: Foreplay (2015), her musical: The Midnight Serenade (2015), The Hoarder (2016), Living on The Grid (The Only Animal, 2017) and her juke-box Opera: Forever Hold Your Peace (Opera Unbound, 2022). Olivia’s play Woman Against Gravity received professional development through the Emerging Voices Program at TheatreOne (2024), the Stage One Festival of New Canadian Work at the Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary (2021) and the Arts Club LEAP Program (2019).  Olivia is ecstatic to be working with Anjela Magpantay and Rice & Beans Theatre. She sends her infinitesimal love and gratitude to Jojo, her family, friends and the community for their support. And a particular thank you to her mom, Susanna Etey and second cousin, András Hamar for living and sharing their extraordinary stories with her.

The DBLSPK Program

DBLSPK (doublespeak) is a recurring rice & beans program that examines the relationship between language and culture within performance and storytelling. By collaborating with artists who work with elements of translation and/or multilingual creation, we examine the relationship between language and culture within performance. During DBLSPK, resident artists have the opportunity to work in the studio with a team of collaborators and then present excerpts of their work at a workshop-setting public performance. The artist then engages with the audience in a conversation post-show, taking a deep dive into the research topics related to their project. In addition to our usual DBLSPK programming, in 2023, the annual, national Polyphonic Multilingual Creation Residency was also added to provide an elongated development process to two projects: one local and one out-of-town.  DBLSPK began in 2017 and has since featured over 15 languages, such as Portuguese, Farsi, Tagalog, Cantonese, Spanish, and more!