Translation and performance in an era of global asymmetries

The articles in this special issue, and another that will follow in the next issue, arise from a three-year research project that brought together researchers and practitioners of theatre and performance from South Africa, India and the Netherlands to focus on translation and performance, particularly in a context of global power asymmetries and discontinuities. The project was generously funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa with additional funding from the University of Cape Town, the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis. The focus in the project was not so much translation in the linguistic sense, in which it is most commonly understood (although it did not ignore this aspect either). Rather, the focus was on translation in its root sense of ‘a carrying over’ across a much broader range of semiotic, sensory and inter-subjective forms and practices, including the conveying of gestures, styles, dramaturgy, and genres, moving across media, historical periods, cultural contexts and physical spaces.

The field of translation studies has opened up in recent times broadly speaking ‘from textual to cultural translation, or from the translation of language to the translation of action’ (Bachmann-Medick 2009, p. 5). While Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘translational transnational’ in his book The Location of Culture (1994, p. 173) is an obvious, high profile and influential example, there have been a whole host of areas that have been investigated through the lens of translation since the turn of the millennium. A sample of these studies and areas would include migration as a form of translational action (Papastergiadis 2000); violence and translation (Das 2002); translating terror (Bassnett 2005); translation and conflict (Baker 2006).

Our project took shape against the backdrop of two broad processes at work in the world that could be seen as both generally applicable to all contexts and specifically applicable to South Africa: globalization and post-apartheid. We would suggest that these two processes taken together could be described as forming one of the key social questions globally today. What has become known as globalization – the vast interconnection of peoples, economies, political processes with its intensive migratory and intercultural consequences – requires of us to engage in active and urgent ways with the challenge of being together rather than being kept apart or keeping ourselves apart. If the period we are living through in South Africa today is truly post-apartheid then in a very literal sense the project we must be engaged in is that which lies beyond separateness. It is the project of trying to ‘be together’. While this is obviously apparent in the South African context it is not limited to it. In the context of Europe, the recent resurgence of a racialized underpinning of national identity in different European societies alerts us both to the infinite translatability of the phenomenon of fascism as well as to the importance of a continual recalibration of translation towards the goals of a radical planetarity, rather than a narrow and aggressive, racially coded cultural determinism (Gilroy 2019). In India, alarming levels of socio-economic disparities are compounded by a growing authoritarian politics of divisiveness, hardened on the grounds of gender, caste, ethnicity, and religion. The task of a cultural translation might then be one of doing justice to the pluralities and multiplicities of what becomes ossified as a monolithic national culture (Ramanujan 1991). An interview with Indian performer and dancer, Maya Krishna Rao, featured in this issue, attests to the complexities of this task, by way of reflecting on translation processes in her solo performance Ravanama.

Our interest in translation is thus both pragmatic and philosophical. In its pragmatic dimension it is focused on dramaturgical strategies in the making of performances that involve translation in one sense or another. In its philosophical dimension it is focused on a kind of thinking through and by means of performance that is centred on translation in a broader sense in which the theatrical encounter is conceived of beyond the limits of the theatre space itself but without excluding that space. Theatre is the engagement between self and other. It is the place in which a whole series of encounters occurs between entities both human and other than human: between people and things both on stage, in the auditorium and in the world broadly. Theatre is composed of a multitude of moments: small units of time passing in action by means of which one actor encounters another, and while each of these moments is very specifically located in time and place it is also linked to broader processes of historically and culturally specific experience, thinking and signification. These many moments of encounter in the theatre are composed of gestures – both in the obvious sense in which the performer uses movements of the body and the voice and of words to engender affective states or to convey particular feelings intended to touch the spectator. But it is composed of gestures too in the other sense of delicate, fragile, often vain attempts to make contact, to touch the other or to reach the other, attempts made with the full knowledge that they are unlikely to have the intended effect (at least in any sense of completeness or satisfaction). Yet despite this both sets of actors – those who perform and those performed to – emerge from the encounter having been touched to some degree and having been altered or shifted as a consequence. Like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream we are ‘translated’. As Zygmunt Bauman argues: ‘No act of translation leaves either of the partners intact. Both emerge from their encounter changed, different at the end of the act from what they were at the beginning’ (Bauman 1999, p. xlviii).

However, this should not be interpreted so as to suggest that the project has been about a simple kind of ‘bridge-building’ to overcome difference or a kind of cultural consumption, what bel hooks has referred to as ‘eating the other’: the ways in which difference can become ‘spice, seasoning to liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’ (1992, p. 21). What is explored here is not exchange in the commodity sense but encounter, with the particular focus of the project being on discontinuity, ‘on the fractures and disparities in the translation dynamic’ (Bachmann-Medick 2009, p. 8).

Gayatri Spivak argues that the act of translation is based on an assumption ‘that the generality of a semiotics … can appropriate the singularity of the other’s idiom by way of conscientious approximations’. However, it is her position that ‘the idiom is singular to the tongue. It will not go over’ (2000, p. 15) only the semiotic is in fact generalizable. What she seems to be pointing towards is the ‘irreducible importance of idiom, which a standard language, however native, cannot annul’ (p. 22). This notion of the idiomatic, understood both linguistically and extra-linguistically – particularly in the form of bodies and voices – is an important focus of the articles that emerge from the project. Mark Fleishman’s article ‘Migrating Mia Couto’s Voice[s]’ reflects on the dramaturgical strategies adopted in translating the short stories of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto to the stage for a South African audience. Following Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Fleishman argues that beyond recapitulating narratives, it is moreover at the level of ‘prosodic effects’, rhythmic, oral, choral and compositional features, that the work of translation could be most meaningfully undertaken. jackï job’s article ‘Translate(ral) Bodies Through Daai Za Lady and Butoh’ situates the discussion of translation and performance in relation to her own practice as a dancer with extensive training in Butoh and other dance forms, and as a body racialised and gendered as a coloured woman in South Africa. Job’s interpretation of translation attends to the embodied modes of thinking that dance offers. Rather than expressing a fixed internal core, the ongoing translations of the solo performance in various contexts and times demonstrate, she contends, an embodied way of thinking and responding to the world laterally.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel De Certeau recalls a moment in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) in which Crusoe discovers a footprint in the sand that does not belong to him; it is not his footprint, but the source/the origin/ the maker of the footprint is absent. Crusoe describes this mark, made by the absent body, as ‘something wild’ and De Certeau suggests that ‘[t]he wild is transitory; it marks itself … but it does not write itself. It alters a place (it disturbs), but it does not establish a place’. In this sense, for De Certeau, that which is ‘wild’ constitutes ‘an alterity in relation to writing’, an alterity that he calls ‘voice’ (1984, p. 155). The arrival of the voice on/into what had seemed to Crusoe the ‘blank’ (silent) page of the island, the order and ownership of which he is creating through the act of writing his journal or record-book, is an ‘alien enunciation’ that ‘arises alongside, coming from beyond the frontiers reached by the expansion of the scriptural enterprise. “Something” different speaks again and presents itself … in the form of a voice or the cries of the people excluded from the written’ (p. 158). Such ‘returns or turns of voices’ (p. 156) are both ‘illegible’ and cut across the authority and order of statements, ‘moving like strangers through the house of language’ (p. 159).

The problem posed by the footprint in the sand (what Crusoe fears most) is not that it does not speak, it is that when its voice is finally heard (when Friday eventually shows himself), it manifests through one of two modalities: as a ‘cry’ – unintelligible, beyond recognized language and in need of treatment – or through the body as vehicle of language – either docile ‘acting out … the other’s saying’ (p. 155) or wild, disordered, undisciplined, disruptive, violent. In other words, when allowed to speak it threatens the capacity of translation, of ‘scholarly exegesis’ (p. 163), the ‘mechanism, perfected over generations, that makes it possible to … transform the unpredictable or non-sensical “noises” uttered by bodies and voices into (scriptural, produced, and “comprehended”) “messages”’ (p. 160).

When performance ‘speaks’ it does so beyond language; through the body in ‘wild, disordered, undisciplined’ ways. It threatens the capacity of translation, ‘that makes it possible to … transform … non-sensical “noises” uttered by voices into (scriptural, produced, and “comprehended”) “messages”’ (p. 160). Part of the problem here is, as Adriana Cavarero argues, the ‘fundamental theoretical bond [… ] between voice and speech’ (2005, p. 12). For Cavarero, the sphere of the voice is constitutively broader than that of speech: it exceeds it. To reduce this excess to mere meaninglessness – to whatever remains when the voice is not intentioned towards a meaning, defined as the exclusive purview of speech – is one of the chief vices of logocentricism. This vice transforms the excess of the voice into a lack. In other words, logocentricism radically denies to the voice a meaning of its own that is not always already destined to speech (Cavarero 2005, pp. 12–13). Understanding performance as a translation process that engenders and attends to strangeness requires us to engage seriously with those practices and languages that have been marginalized in the academy: the inconvenient languages of the global South and the incomprehensible practices of the body and voice in performance. The ways in which we might achieve this dramaturgically and the thinking that arises from those attempts is what this research project into translation and performance has been about.

Voice and vocality emerge as core concerns in the thinking of translation in performance in the articles by Neo Muyanga and Ricarda Franzen. Through a reading of the complexities of Miriam Makeba’s music and public life, as well as through a reflection on his own artistic experimentations with African choral singing, Neo Muyanga puts forward a number of compelling principles of ‘translational fluidity’ in voice, including anticipation, improvisation, transposition and collaboration. These principles, Muyanga argues, are to be found in Makeba’s musical life, as a prime example of the fluidity and multivalence of voice. They are also integral to the choir, which he regards as an important pedagogical tool in recalibrating plural and multivocal understandings of Africanity. Ricarda Franzen’s article is concerned with the format of audio description in theatre, used as a real-time guide through a performance for visually impaired spectators. By paying attention to the possibilities and limits of a live translation of stage action into live spoken words, Franzen asks how audio description might be understood as more than a mere compensatory form of translation, but moreover as an integral part of the performance, productively foregrounding its own limits and conditions. Audio description can evoke different registers of performance, Franzen argues, ranging from the narrative to the visual to the emotive. It is the challenge of the audio description format as a specific mode of translation to leave spaces for these registers to resonate with each other in the imagination of the audience.

One of the particular areas of our research interest has been on the strangeness produced in the theatrical encounter and the ways in which this is engendered, negotiated, maintained, celebrated perhaps: dwelt in rather than overcome. This strangeness, we would suggest, is either an effect of an absolute alterity that exists outside of the mainstream or a conscious resistance to translatabilty; the way in which the ‘text guards its secrets’ (Spivak 1990, p. 21) or the way in which the ‘other’ becomes ‘the guardian of the margin’ (p. 15) and ‘the unemphatic agent of withholding’ (p. 16). Ahmed (2000) argues that ‘strangeness’ or ‘the stranger’ is not an ontological category but rather is produced in the encounter between the self and the other; between what is understood as an inside (which is apparently known) and an outside (which is apparently unknown). She proceeds from Levinas’s conception of ethics that requires of us to take responsibility for the other when called without an expectation of reciprocity but at the same time to protect the ‘otherness of the other’ in that encounter – to reject the possibility of ever being able to inhabit the place of the other or to ‘know what “the other” means (and therefore needs)’ (Ahmed 2000, p. 166). For Ahmed it is the mode of the encounter itself that is crucial, not the ontological status of the other encountered. Following in this direction of thought, Kati Röttger’s article in this issue, ‘Translating Tragedy’ proposes shifting our understanding of tragedy away from the literary genre towards a more theatrical conception of tragedy as event. This implies a rupturing of the existing order or forms of appearance, and staging an encounter with that which has so far been rendered absent or invisible. Reading Yaël Farber’s production Molora, based on the Greek Oresteia, against scholarly criticisms of the performance, and engaging with theorists of tragedy such as Hölderlin and Derrida, Röttger suggests that the performance may well be an appropriate translation of both the pathos and the ethos of the tragic, if one interprets it as event rather than as literary genre.

Throughout the research project, our interest has been in conceptualizing translation in relation to that moment of encounter in which strangeness is produced and nurtured, thus as an active and emergent and never complete or finished process. It is our hope that the articles in this special issue will suggest ways in which the discipline of theatre and performance studies might serve well as both a model for such a process of translation as well as a lens through which to view translational processes in society more broadly.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation: [Grant Number 99082].