This paper reports on an informal, spontaneous Japanese language seminar for advanced university students focusing on the translation from Japanese into English of Yoko Tawada’s post-disaster playscript Animals’ Babel (2014). The seminar had several aims, including exposing learners to internationally acclaimed literary content, and immersing them into a critique of current civilization and humour through a lively, textual conversation style. The combination of drama and translation transformed the learning space into a self-reflexive activation of the bilingual identities of seminar participants. The fable format of the source text offers a concise version of Tawada’s critique of sustainability and invites readers to perform the text as a diverse group in a process-centred project without specified (“translucent”) outcomes. Based on the author’s involvement in seminar provision and post-project reflection comments offered by its six students, it is argued that recasting the seminar space as a “backstage” nurtures an appreciation of altruistic leadership and self-reflection among students which are integral to the bilingual social identities of foreign language learners. This pedagogical practice offers insight into creating learning spaces under reduced resources.