Translating Theatre: ‘Foreignisation’ on Stage
- Submitting institution
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The University of Kent
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 4708
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- The Gate Theatre, Notting Hill
- Brief description of type
- Performance
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- July
- Year
- 2016
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This multiple-component output evidences an extensive mixed-method two-year theoretical and practice as research project investigating theatre translation practice. The practice-as-research element relied on a complex process of collective investigation which enlisted over forty between fellow academics, PG students and practitioners as co-researchers to produce: three translations of plays (subsequently published as books), three week-long workshops with professional actors and directors leading to three staged readings, three post-show discussions, over thirty audience interviews and a conference. The ensuing desk-based stage reflected on the purport of practice findings from a more detached perspective, producing a peer-reviewed article and a short monograph.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This portfolio documents research carried out by Laera during her AHRC Leadership Fellowship, ‘Translation, Adaptation, Otherness: “Foreignization” in Theatre Practice’ (2016–19). Laera reassessed Lawrence Venuti’s influential notion of ‘foreignization’ – an ethical approach to translation paying respect to a source’s difference – from a theatre studies perspective. Her research question was: How can performances of translated plays communicate linguistic and cultural difference, avoiding both the assimilation of source material into the target culture and the exoticization of otherness?
Process. Phase 1: Selection of three European plays that disrupted current British aesthetics and genre conventions (e.g. plot-less, anti-naturalistic). Phase 2: PR workshops to investigate textual and performative strategies to stage the selected plays, enlisting professional creatives as co-investigators. Participant observation and interviews with creatives and spectators. Phase 3: Data analysis and reflection on PR insights.
Insights. Laera recommends reconfiguring the source’s linguistic and cultural difference by disrupting hegemonic performance conventions in the target context – e.g. by practising non-standard casting – to disrupt spectators’ expectations. These resistant strategies communicate difference as a relative strategic construction, not as an absolute essence, thus avoiding appropriation. PR performance-related insights were presented as staged readings in London and PR text-related insights were published as play translations. PR insights were then theorised in academic publications recommending resistant performance strategies supplementing Venuti’s textual arguments.
Dissemination. PaR insights were shared in person (staged readings and symposium in London; keynotes delivered by Laera in UK, Belgium, Poland, Portugal); online (project website; documentary; translated plays published as ebooks); and academic publications (journal article; short monograph).
The project won the 2018 Kent Starting Research Prize and the TaPRA ECR Prize. According to TaPRA judges, the project ‘constitutes a significant expansion of our current knowledge of theatre in translation and adaptation, with major implications for both performance scholarship and practice’.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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