Out of the Wings

Invisible Presences: Translation, Dramaturgy and Performance (click here for pdf poster)

‘Invisible Presences’ is presented under the aegis of Out of the Wings, an AHRC‐funded project exploring Spanish theatre in English translation, in association with the Dramaturgies Project, and the Translation, Adaptation, and Dramaturgy Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

Drama and Film Centre Queen’s University Belfast 18‐20 April 2011

This international conference will explore the dramaturgical processes of translation in performance practice, whether across language and culture or the translation of ideas into material production. Rather than seeing the processes of writing (whether collaborative or singleauthored), translation, rehearsal, production, and audience reception as separate and discrete, the conference will engage with approaches that view the process as more of a continuum, one that is perpetually at work. In this way the conference offers the opportunity for dialogue between contemporary practitioners, both translators and theatre makers, and for new insights into dramaturgy and translation that seek to map the growing convergence between theatre practice and translation.

The conference will feature:

• A range of eminent keynote speakers
• Practical workshops exploring issues of dramaturgy and translation
• Performances
• Panel sessions
• Round table discussions

Areas for discussion include, but are not limited to:

• Translation and its metaphorical apprehension of text
• Translation and its audiences
• Translation and the contingency of performance
• Collaborative translation processes
• The limits of translation
• Translation and ethics
• Dramaturgy as translation/ translational process
• Visual theatre: dramaturgies and translations of light, sound, space
• Technology: new relationships with audiences in online productions
• The dramaturgical process in different contexts:
• Case studies from practitioners and scholars exploring the issues and particularities of each context, such as community arts, theatre for young people, cross‐art collaboration processes and facilitation, ‘postdramatic’ dramaturgies, queer dramaturgies, disability arts, collaborative writing processes, etc.

Proposals addressing the themes of the conference are invited in the forms of:

• 20 minute paper presentation
• 2 hour workshop

Please submit proposals of 300 ‐ 500 words, with 150‐word biography, by 30 September 2010, to the organisers:

Alyson Campbell: a.e.campbell@qub.ac.uk

David Johnston: d.johnston@qub.ac.uk

Kurt Taroff: k.taroff@qub.ac.uk

Way to Heaven, David Johnston’s translation of Juan Mayorga’s award-winning play Himmelweg (Camino del cielo), comes to Sydney’s SBW Stables Theatre between 14 April and 8 May 2010. Directed by Tanya Goldberg, the play is a collaborative production between the Ride On Theatre and Griffin Theatre Companies:

‘The curtain falls and, suddenly… that whole world disappears.’

1942. The heart of Europe. An orchestra performs in the village square. Two boys play with a spinning top. A young couple quarrel on a park bench. And a ramp rises from a deserted train station where the clock is frozen at six o’clock. An ordinary town goes about its ordinary day. People perform for their lives.

Way to Heaven ventures deep into the fracture between appearance, performance and the terrible reality of Theresienstadt – the concentration camp notoriously presented to the outside world as a model Jewish settlement.

From renowned Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga comes a searing examination of fear, control and the power of performance.

See a trailer for the production here: Way to Heaven Trailer.

Tanya Goldberg, director of the production, gives her thoughts on the production here: Tanya Goldberg discusses Way to Heaven.

PERFORMANCE DATES

Preview 14 April
Season 16 April – May 8

PERFORMANCE TIMES

Monday – Saturday 7pm
Saturday Matinee 8 May 2pm
School Matinee 4 May 12:30 pm

PRODUCTION NOTES

Translated by David Johnston

Director Tanya Goldberg
Set Designer Simone Romaniuk
Costume Designer Xanthe Heubel
Lighting Designer Verity Hampson
Producers Esti Regos, and Viv Rosman
for Performing Lines
Associate Producer Joanna Fishman
With Lexi Freiman, Nicholas Hope, Marko Jovanovic, Nathan Lovejoy, Terry Serio, Tami Sussman

VENUE

SBW Stables Theatre
10 Nimrod Street
Kings Cross NSW 2011

More information on this production can be found by clicking on the Griffin Theatre Company website.

The Faculty of Translating and Interpreting at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is hosting a two-day international conference on ‘Translation and the Scenic Arts: Theatre and Opera’, 15-16 April 2010. This conference is a joint project between the UAB and the Betwixt and Between research group, Queen’s University Belfast.

LA TRADUCCIÓ EN ESCENA

II Jornades Internacionals de Traducció en les Arts Escéniques: Opera i Teatre

Location: Classroom 1 & 2 of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

THURSDAY 15 APRIL 2010

11h30-12h

• Initial Meeting, Classroom 2 of the Facultat de Traducció i Interpretació (Faculty of Translation and Interpreting) of the UAB

12h-13h:

• David Johnston (introduced by Joan Sellent): “Translation, Translation Studies and Theatre Practice”

Lunch

15h30-17h

• Chair: Miquel Edo
• Rossend Arqués: “Les belles infidèles: les traduccions d’actor”
• Laura Bernadini: “Teatro catalano contemporaneo in Italia: tradurre per la scena”
• Eduard Bartoll: “La sobretitulació d’obres teatrals”

17h-18h30

• Chair: Anna Corral
• Joaquim Sala: “Teoria i pràctica de la subtitulació d’Òperes: el cas d’Òpera oberta”
• Francesc Cortès: “La traducció i adaptació d’obres líriques a Catalunya: la formació i deformació d’una òpera cantada en català”
• Miquel Edo: “La rima, obstacle i repte en la traducció de llibrets d’òpera”

21h: Conference Dinner

FRIDAY 16 APRIL 2010

10h-11h30

• Chair: Pilar Orero
• Stephen Kelly: “Theatre Translation as Cultural and Historical Re-encounter: the British Reception of the Soweto Mysteries”
• Sarah Maitland: “Performing Hospitality: Translation, Difference and the Intercultural Stage”
• Aline Fernandes: “Travelling Plays, Travelling Audiences: From Marina Carr’s Irish Midlands to Somewhere Lost and Found in Brazil”

Coffee

12h-13h30

• Chair: Ramon Lladó
• Albers Franciscus: “Shakespeare on the Dutch scene”
• Ramon Farrés: “Distorsions del llenguatge en la dramatúrgia austríaca contemporània: un repte per al traductor”
• Joan Sellent: “La importància de ser fidel”

Lunch

16h-17h: Round Table Discussion

• Chair: David Johnston
• Lawrence Boswell: Theatre Director
• Sergi Belbel: Theatre Director, Dramaturg and Translator
• Cristina Genebat: Actress and Translator

17h: Close

For more information, please email Professor David Johnston at Queen’s University Belfast: d.johnston@qub.ac.uk or contact the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting at the UAB: d.traduccio@uab.cat

Professor Lawrence Venuti, Queen’s University Belfast 8–9 March 2010

The Queen’s Research Forum for Translation and Cultural Encounter is hosting two seminars by Lawrence Venuti. Lawrence Venuti is Professor of English at Temple University. He is also a translator and has written and edited a number of books on translation theory. The following two seminars will take place on 8 and 9 March 2010.

All are welcome to attend.

Monday 8 March, 7.00p.m.

Queen’s University Belfast. Seminar Room, Postgraduate Centre, 18 College Green. This seminar will be followed by a wine reception.

Genealogies of Translation Theory: Jerome

This lecture offers an historical examination and ideological critique of Jerome’s famous Letter to Pammachius (395CE), exploring its relation to Roman imperial culture, on the one hand, and to an emerging Christian culture, on the other. Jerome’s letter is the most influential statement of what can be called the instrumental model of translation, the notion that translation is the reproduction or imitation of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. Jerome’s effort to sketch a Christian translation tradition is considered as a means of legitimizing his own translation practices, but attention is also given to modern developments like Eugene Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence. The aim is to formulate and argue for the comprehensiveness and ethical value of a hermeneutic model, the notion that translation is a variable interpretation that is culturally and historically contingent. The ethics of translation to be proposed here will draw on the work of Alain Badiou, specifically his concept of a truth‐based ethics that challenges institutionalized knowledges and communitarian interests. The instrumental model as formulated and applied by Jerome is affiliated with a Roman Christian elite whose interests are masked by its translation theory and practice.

Tuesday 9 March, 5.00p.m.

Queen’s University Belfast. Lanyon Building, Room G09

Ekphrasis, Translation, Critique

Translation theory enables a rigorous critical methodology that can advance thinking about ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual art. The relation between such a second‐order work and its source material is not instrumental, not a reproduction or transfer of a formal or semantic invariant, but rather hermeneutic, an interpretation that varies source form and meaning through the application of an interpretant. The hermeneutic relation must be viewed as transformative because a key aspect of any interpretant is its relation to cultural traditions and social situations that differ from those of the source material. As a result, the hermeneutic relation can be treated not only as interpretive, a variable attempt to fix source form and meaning, but as interrogative, exposing the cultural and social conditions of the source material and of the second‐order work that has processed it. The critic in turn applies an interpretant, whether a critical methodology or specific interpretation, to formulate the hermeneutic relation and its interrogative effects. The lecture will review the literature on ekphrasis from the vantage point of translation theory and then develop a translation‐oriented method for reading ekphrastic texts. The case study is Rosanna Warren’s 1984 poem, “Renoir,” which is based on Renoir’s painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881).

For further information contact Professor David Johnston at d.johnston@qub.ac.uk

Kate Eaton’s translations of two plays by Cuban playwright Virgilio Pinera (You Always Forget Something and Thin Man Fat Man) will be presented as a double bill by third year students from Central School of Speech and Drama at the Arcola Theatre from Wednesday 3rd to Saturday 6th of March. For full details please visit the Arcola website: www.arcolatheatre.com or phone the box office on 020 7503 1646.

AHRC-funded project ‘Out of the Wings’ presents its

2010 Symposium

‘Spanish Golden Age Drama in Translation and Performance’

at Merton College, Oxford

18-19 March 2010

REGISTRATION FORM AVAILABLE HERE:

Registration and Accommodation, Catering OTW ‘10

Translating and performing the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca, and other playwrights of the Golden Age have sparked an increasing amount of interest, heightened by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2004-5 Golden Age season. Our Symposium will be attended by both academic and theatrical practitioners working within the field of Golden Age drama, and a wider base of attendees interested in Spanish theatre in general, as well as University colleagues and students. Speakers will be drawn from the United States and Europe, representing a variety of areas of expertise in translation and performance of the comedia. Please explore our website (www.outofthewings.org) for more information on the project, and see the rest of the blog for past events.

Black and White Rainbow theatre company present our own David Johnston’s translation of this ‘mad’ play at the Trafalgar Studios in the New Year.

For more information see the London Theatre Guide article here.

Mision Symposium Poster

There will be an exciting symposium on the Spanish Civil War
and theatre at the University of Leeds. There are also performances of
the play (in Spanish) on Thursday 3 and Saturday 5 December at
Stage@Leeds. Tickets are available from www.stage.leeds.ac.uk

Translation and Spanish Theatre continue to be In the Air…

Below is a link for more information about upcoming rehearsed readings of contemporary Spanish translated plays organised by Rose Bruford College and Caos Editorial. Out of the Wings visited this event last year and is looking forward to another great series of readings.

http://www.eurotheatro.eu/eurotheatro/en/actos/2009Londres.html
For those interested in attending the event on Friday 16 October, the person to contact is Diane Stacey at Rose Bruford, email diane.stacey[at]bruford.ac.uk or telephone 0208 3082618.

Call for papers: Graduate Colloquium on Theatre Translation at Queen Mary,
University of London; Department of Drama

GRADUATE CONFERENCE funded by the AHRC and the GRADUATE SCHOOL IN
HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

***Theatre translation as collaboration: re-routing text through
performance***

Saturday 20 March 2010 at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS

Keynote speakers: Professor J. Michael Walton and playwright Colin Teevan

Round table chaired by critic Aleks Sierz, featuring playwright Martin
Crimp and theatre practitioners tba

Afternoon workshop led by Graínne Byrne of Scarlet Theatre

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