Loss and Being Lost: Performing Precarity through Multi-lingual Text, Song and Music in Zoo Indigo's 'Don't Leave Me This Way'

This article examines the function of music and multilingualism in Zoo Indigo’s Don’t Leave Me This Way. Through an engagement with live music, song and multilingual spoken text, an “affective potential of tonality” (Fischer-Lichte 120) is explored to express themes of precarity. The use of multilingualism functions “to upset the position of dominant language” (Byczynski 33), further highlighting a cultural precarity in a Brexit-ridden Britain. Drawing upon Butler’s constructivist view of performativity, the authors reflect on a narrative of loss and being lost communicated and understood through a dramaturgical framework of multilingualism, mother tongues, live music, pre-recorded sounds and song.