Translation and performance in an era of global asymmetries: Part 2

The articles in this issue, follow on from a previous special issue Translation and Performance in an Era of Global Asymmetries Part 2 (2019). Both issues stem from a three-year research project that drew together theatre and performance researchers and practitioners from South Africa, India and the Netherlands. The focus of the project was on translation and performance, particularly in the context of global power asymmetries and discontinuities. The project was funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa with supplementary funding from the University of Cape Town, the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis.

The introduction to the first part of this special issue provides a comprehensive account of how the project engaged the field of translation and its application in the context of theatre and performance in the global South. It also outlines the critical thinkers and theorists that informed the research. The introduction to this issue deliberately avoids repeating this. After a brief overview of how we view translation to associate with theatre and performance, we move to focus on the four contributions that make up the issue.

The project engaged an understanding of translation in the sense of ‘carrying over’ rather than on the linguistic faculty of the word. The idea of ‘carrying over’ encompasses a range of possibilities and approaches when applied to theatre and performance; the carrying over of ideas, of experiences, of understandings, to name a few. These approaches foreground an understanding of translation that is performative, where the act of performance serves to translate, and the act of translation lends itself to performance.

One of the key issues the project sought to address was that of globalization and how it has affected the possibilities of being together in a world where impositions of disconnection are evident. This is a world characterized by polarization and asymmetries that cultivate distrust in governance and the idea of the nation state. The global South, in particular, as formally colonized regions of the world, presents with gross asymmetries of wealth, access to the economy, gender inequalities and violence, and environmental degradation. The project thus attempted to address the potentialities that exist beyond separateness and instead focused on exploring ways of being together through theatre and performance. It feels uncanny to be writing this in a period of lockdown in South Africa and in most parts of the world where a pandemic has forced us to explore ways of connecting remotely. It feels counter-intuitive to theatre and performance’s insistence on embodied connectivity founded on practices and principles of relationality and liveness, in which spaces of live encounter provide opportunities for translational acts to occur. It seems to us as if, more than ever, we need to focus on creating encounters that foreground relationality. Theatre and performance, because of its focus on embodied practices, offers practical tools to realize and translate what it means to be a somatically present self in a relational context. Theatre and performance methodologies are integrative and incorporate emotional, spiritual, mental and embodied intelligences. Principally, these methodologies emphasize the relational interdependence of all who participate in the encounter.

The emphasis on translation in this project was both pragmatic and philosophical. The pragmatic aspect sheds light on performance making processes that centre dramaturgical approaches. The philosophical position focuses on thinking through and with the body in performance, where the act of translation occurs in the encounter between different things. These encounters occur in multiple forms, for example, between people, between people and objects and between ideas. The driver of these encounters is the desire to touch/move another and to be touched/moved by another. These translational encounters seemingly provide opportunities for connection in an ever-increasing world of disconnection. It is crucial, however, to stress that this need for connection is not motivated by a desire to build bridges or to enforce a multicultural ‘melting pot’ espoused by the rainbow rhetoric of South Africa post-1994, but rather to explore “the fractures and disparities in the translation dynamic’ (Bachmann-Meddick 2009, p .8)

In line with ideas around translation as an act of fostering connectivity in times of global asymmetry, Swati Arora’s article, ‘Walk in India and South Africa: Notes towards a Decolonial and Transnational Feminist Politics’, speaks to the need for intercultural translation and alliances between countries that make up the global South. The focus of her article is on Maya Krishna Rao’s production Walk and The Mothertongue Project’s translation of Rao’s production, titled Walk: South Africa. Rao crafted Walk after the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, a 23-year-old student who was tortured, raped and killed by six men on a Delhi bus in December 2012. A few months later, The Mothertongue Project, with Rao’s permission, created their version of Walk as a response to the gang-rape and murder of Anene Booysen, a South African teenager, in 2013. The unimaginably horrific assault and deaths of these two women was a catalyst to create Walk: South Africa as a way to honour their memories and to talk honestly about rape culture. Arora draws on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s translation-as-dialogue (2014) to investigate translation as a form of dialogue between these two performances. Further to this, Arora views translation in these two productions as a form of building transnational feminist solidary (Mohanty 2013) towards inspiring intersectional feminist conversations between artists in India and South Africa. The idea of solidarity speaks to the moments of encounter and the promissory act of being together that theatre and performance offers. The understanding that translation builds transnational feminist solidarity addresses how translation in the context of performance moves beyond the act of simply transposing one text (the original) into another (the translation). It speaks to the multiple layers and ways of translation that performance offers. In Arora’s case studies, it brings feminist activism from two contexts into a space where they can converse and feed off one another. They exist as separate works with their own identities, and yet when brought into conversation with one another, they foster solidarity.

These alternative views of translation that are embodied in performance practice are picked up in Sruti Bala’s article, ‘Necessary misapplications: the work of translation in performance in an era of global asymmetries’. The article considers how translation is employed in theatre and performance. Bala draws on the idea of the translator’s note that traditionally functions as, a ‘curious mix of a descriptive appendix to the translated text’. She invites the reader to contemplate where a translator’s note could be found in performance. Bala argues that because performance includes and surpasses language, the notion of translation moves beyond the common perception and function of the word that seeks to find sameness between the original and the translated text. She argues that performance demands something different from the ‘standard’ act of translation; it requires it to become something else. It asks for a misapplication of the term, for it to become what Gayatri Spivak terms ‘catachrestic’ (2012, p. 242). To illustrate her point, Bala engages Ivorian choreographer and performer Nadia Beugré’s performance, Legacy, to explore philosophical and pragmatic aspects of translation and how they operate in the context of performance.

Sara Matchett and Rehane Abrahams’ article, ‘The Application of a Translational Performance Method Using Archival Material and Somatic Practices: the making of Womb of Fire’ explores translation as an embodied practice. The authors centre their argument around Womb of Fire, a production they were both involved in creating, Abrahams as the playwright and performer and Matchett as the director. The play engaged Abrahams’ slave ancestry as well as her indigenous Khoekhoen ancestry to examine violence against women connected with the Dutch colonization of the Cape. It utilised the myth of Draupadi from the Indian epic, the Mahabharata to translate the archival narratives of two women from the founding years of the Cape. Matchett employed her research around investigating the body as a site for generating images for purposes of performance-making as a way of activating and translating images and experiences that exist in the body of the performer. As such, the body of the performer served as a channel for translating the archival narratives as well as the myth. The understanding of translation in the sense of ‘carrying over’ is specifically interrogated in the article. The authors use the example of enslavement from one of the archival stories, where the character is carried across the ocean on multiple occasions from one geographic context to the next, to inform the structure of the playtext. This is seen in how the myth provided a container within which the two archival narratives were translated. It is also seen in the ways in which the archival narratives, the myth and the personal narrative of the playwright/performer were interchanged within a single scene. These examples illustrate how the structure of the text served to translate and carry multiple narratives over geographies and time and provided opportunities for them to intersect and at times, merge to become one story.

The idea of myth serving as a possible container for translation is further explored in Jennie Reznek’s play, I turned away and she was gone. In an interview with Sruti Bala, Reznek interrogates this idea through a set of questions around how she used myth to make the work. Central to these questions is an inquiry into what story was being told, in other words, was it the myth of Persephone and Demeter or was it Reznek’s personal story. She comes to the conclusion that myth, in this instance, provided her with a structure within which she could weave and translate her personal experiences. She talks about the myth providing a dramaturgical architecture. In the interview, Reznek also speaks about the importance of play in processes of translation in theatre and performance. She specifically references how the idea of play, in terms of the elastic quality of the word, allowed for an interplay between the details of her own life and those of the gods and goddesses in the myth. What play did in this instance was to make the myth more translatable to a contemporary audience and allowed audience members space to insert their narratives into the work. As such, the myth enabled audience members to reflect on their own experiences of womanhood, ageing, and loss, to name a few of the key themes of the work. The interview is interspersed with images from the play photographed by Mark Wessels. These offer another layer of translation by visually translating the text as a reminder for those who expeirenced the work and for those who did not see the work.

The contributions to this second special issue on ‘Translation and Performance in an Era of Global Asymmetries’ have a clear focus on women. All four offerings are authored by women and focus on women performers, women’s stories and women’s experiences. This is no coincidence when one reflects on the title of the issue. Asymmetry resonates distinctly with women’s experiences globally. The asymmetrical experiences of women from the global South are more pronounced in an era of globalization. Arora’s call for solidarity across feminist movements in the global South, Bala’s focus on Ivorian choreographer and performer Nadia Beugré’s performance, Legacy, Matchett and Abrahams’ weaving together of stories of violence perpetrated on women from the archive and mythology and how these serve to translate current, personal experiences of violence, and Reznek’s work that spans three generations of women structured around a myth that focuses on two female deities, all speak to the need for women to reflect on their experiences and write themselves into a global narrative. By so doing, they set out to challenge the asymmetry created by heteronormativity and patriarchy that characterize the era of globalization, with its latent focus on separation and narrow capitalist gains embedded in the legacy of colonialism.