Out of the Wings Needs You!

As a collective of practitioners made up of volunteers, OOTW is only as strong as its constituent parts.  We are also unusual in the world of UK theatre as our programming is based entirely on a completely and continuously open submission process.  So if you think you could contribute to the running of the collective, or have a translation in the works that you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you.

An opportunity to join the Management Team

The management team of OOTW works all year long in a voluntary capacity to keep our work going. As well as being translators and researchers, we bring together skills in, for example, management, producing, web design, marketing. 

We are looking to recruit some new members of the team. If you think you can offer something to the collective and you have the time and capacity to dedicate to our work throughout the year, please contact us on info@outofthewings.org.  

Elena Sanz, Carly Fernández & Ángel López-Silva rehearsing ‘Wanted A Pillbox’ at OOTW2022. Photograph by Terry Cripps.

Widening our Scope

Our monthly table-reads and annual festival are programmed entirely from translations brought to us by translators themselves.  These may be translators who are members of the collective, who have engaged with us before, or whom we are meeting for the first time.  We are always grateful to the translation community for their work, without which OOTW simply could not exist.  We are always keen to receive more translations to read.  

In particular, we want to explore more work from parts of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds that we have yet to reach.  While playwriting from some countries has been well represented in our work, there are other countries, and entire regions, from which we have yet to read a translation or have received very few (**see below for more details).  We were delighted to present our first-ever play from Venezuela at OOTW2022 and look forward to reading work from Central America in the coming months, and hope that this can be part of a widening of the work that we are able to platform.

We are also especially keen to read work from writers and translators from backgrounds, identities and experiences that have been underrepresented in literary translation, and in the theatres of the anglophone world and where Spanish and Portuguese are spoken.  

As events like our ‘Black Playwrights of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds’ explored, there is a wealth of work that we know is out there but has yet to find its way to us in English translation. As we look ahead to our monthly reads and festival for 2023, and beyond, we warmly encourage any translators working on such material to get in touch with us.

Our monthly reads are open to all, and are an informal laboratory space rather than a formal performance event.  In this vein, we welcome translations at any stage of their progress and translators at any stage of their practice.  If you have any questions, please take a look at our FAQs, or do not hesitate to get in touch directly. 

We look forward to hearing from you and to seeing you at our next table read.  We’ll be exploring Facing the End of the World by the Honduran playwright Luís Emilio Cerna Mazier and translated into English by Larisa Muñoz.  Join us on person in London, or online, at 1500BST on October 28.  Details, as always, will be sent out via our mailing list.  Join it here.

**Countries represented in our monthly reads since March 2015:  Spain (18 plays, including Golden Age [3] and Catalonia [3]), Chile (9), Brazil (8), Colombia (5), Argentina (5), Peru (5), Uruguay (4), Cuba (3), Mexico (3), UK (3), Portugal (2), Venezuela (1), Nicaragua (1).

Countries represented in our annual festival since 2016: Spain (7 plays, including 2 from Catalonia), Brazil (3), Peru (3), Chile (3), Portugal (3), Argentina (3), Uruguay (3), Cuba (3), Colombia (2), Mexico (2), Venezuela (1).