Translating In and For the Theatre: The Case for Translationality | Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
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Jean Graham-Jones The City University of New York, Graduate Center In my recent monograph, Contemporary Performance Translation, I draw upon my decades-long experience as translator, actor, director, spectator, and educator to propose an alternative understanding of the translation process itself. Rather than limiting performance translation to the linguistic and the cultural, I propose including other elements such as dramaturgical logic and staging; actor training, casting, and performance styles; gesture and embodiment; and performance aesthetics and reception. A theory of translationality -- in which translations do not replace the original but rather stand in relation to it and to other texts and performances -- encapsulates the collaborative exchange between contemporary translators and theatre artists. In this presentation, I describe my conceptual approach, providing examples from my own scholarly study, pedagogy, and artistic practice. I advocate for a broader yet more entangled engagement with performance translation to explore the myriad ways in which the translational is already at work in the theatre and might be even more fruitfully leveraged in our shared performance experiences. Jean Graham-Jones is the Lucille Lortel Professor of Theatre, Emerita, at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where she headed the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance from 2009 to 2016. A theatre artist and scholar, she has translated into English over two dozen plays by Argentinian artists and published some fifty articles on Latin American (especially Argentinian) theatre and performance. Her major publications include Exorcising History: Argentine Theater under Dictatorship (Bucknell), Reason Obscured: Nine Plays by Ricardo Monti (ed. and trans., Bucknell), BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation (ed. and trans., TCG/Segal Center), Timbre 4: Two Plays by Claudio Tolcachir (ed. and trans., TCG/Segal Center), Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón (Michigan), Lola Arias: Re-enacting Life (ed., Performance Research Books), and the recent Contemporary Performance Translation: Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Stage (Cambridge). She edited Theatre Journal from 2004 to 2007 and served as president of the International Federation for Theatre Research from 2015 to 2019.
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