South African Theatre Journal最新文献

{"title":"Voicing fluid voices: reflections of the multivalence of voice in Miriam Makeba’s art and life","authors":"N. Muyanga","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2019.1639542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2019.1639542","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines voice and voicing in translation processes in music, using on the one hand the example of Miriam Makeba, and on the other hand, features of African choir, in order to develop a broader argument about the musical and political significance of the multivalence of voice. The article begins with a re-valuation of some of the contributions of Miriam Makeba and their relevance to contemporary concerns of the twenty-first century, specifically to societies such as South Africa. It reflects on some of the salient revelations in her autobiography as well as on her music, her style and her politics. I argue that Makeba deployed voice as a sophisticated vehicle of translation with a vision of multivalent and plural futures. In the final section of the article, I reflect on my own artistic involvements and experiments using choir, both in translating African choral traditions to contemporary European performance contexts, as well as in the African repurposing of Western choral elements. My interest in voice and embodied translation is not merely technical, but reflects a political concern and vision, which at its core, strives towards a recalibration and reconstitution of concepts of Africanity, not as rigid and exclusionary, but rather as multi-valent and pluriversal.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"63 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2019.1639542","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41965321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Translate(ral) bodies through Daai za Lady and Butoh","authors":"Jackï Job","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2019.1616608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2019.1616608","url":null,"abstract":"This article looks at a body of work, Daai za Lady, as a mode of translating complex notions of hybrid identity in South Africa. The translatability of the work lies in its inherent signature theme, that identity cannot be fixed as the body itself can access ways of knowing and being based on multiple elements, memories and origins within and beyond itself. Iterations of this work, performed over a 25-year period within different cultural, political and social contexts across the globe, are explicated. To avoid singular meanings, both visible and visceral cognitions are acknowledged in the descriptions and analyses. The article includes references to Benjamin’s theories, and draws from Spivak, Barad, Ahmed and Coetzee to argue for ongoing translation processes that require difficulty, difference, strangeness and the unknown, in order to discard hegemonic values and create new ontologies and epistemologies. The term translate(ral) is used to describe a dance vocabulary developed through Daai za Lady and its absorption of Butoh principles in both making and performance processes. Overall, the article argues for an otherworldly embodied thinking, along with an alternate and imaginative body language that affects modes of consciousness from lateral perspectives and calls for self-determination in the world.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"21 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2019.1616608","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44594613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘When you hold your eyes wide open, you actually don’t see fully’: on translation processes in the solo performance Ravanama (2011)","authors":"M. K. Krishna Rao, S. Bala","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2019.1623490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2019.1623490","url":null,"abstract":"Maya Krishna Rao is a well-known name in contemporary Indian theatre, most widely known for her solo shows and for her performances in protest events in support of women’s rights and social justice. Each of her performances has a distinctive vocabulary and form, ranging from dance theatre, multimedia performance, to rock concerts and stand-up comedy. Rao’s performances are inspired by her training in Kathakali, allowing her to straddle the worlds of dance and theatre in the search for a contemporary language of performance. The themes respond acutely to issues in contemporary India and offer sharp glimpses of urban life. She has been commissioned by prestigious international theatre festivals and has travelled widely with her shows. She is a recipient of the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for acting in 2010, which she returned in 2015 in protest against what she described as the government’s indifference to the growing intolerance in India. Maya Rao was Professor at the Shiv Nadar University till 2017, where she taught Theatre for Education and Social Transformation. This conversation took place in the framework of the research project on translation and performance (in collaboration with the University of Cape Town and the University of Amsterdam, 2016–19). Rao shared her reflections on the artistic processes of translation in the solo performance ‘Ravanama’. The conversation took place in July 2017 at Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Arts & Research in Pondicherry, India.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"77 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2019.1623490","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46853131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"One ear on the stage and one in the audience? – Audio description and listening to theatre as dramaturgical exercise","authors":"Ricarda Franzen","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2019.1614975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2019.1614975","url":null,"abstract":"This article looks at conceptualizations of audio description of theatre performances, which commonly are provided in real-time for visually impaired spectators. While audio descriptions can be formally categorized as a type of extra-diegetic paratext, like translators’ notes, they are however quite unique in their performative aspect. The article argues for a new understanding of this type of ‘crossmodal’ translation [Fryer 2016. An introduction to audio description: a practical guide. Oxford: Routledge] in regarding it as an integral part of a performance. Regarding audio description as a multisensory practice results not only in the inquiry into a format, but offers on a more philosophical level, a new perspective on the limits and possibilities of performative aspects of listening in theatre. The article builds on exercises with international dramaturgy students in Amsterdam regarding a dramaturgical take on the making-of audio descriptions (2017) and, as entrance example, on the performance Blind Cinema by Britt Hatzius, which draws creatively on considerations vital to the practice of audio description. Questions emerging from the study and production of audio descriptions revolve around (un)translatability and dramaturgical choices, requiring the author to consider aesthetic, cultural and sensory factors involved in the preparation and performance of audio description.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"48 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2019.1614975","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45806520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Translation and performance in an era of global asymmetries","authors":"Mark Fleishman, S. Bala","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2019.1641352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2019.1641352","url":null,"abstract":"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 tra","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2019.1641352","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45133444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Migrating Mia Couto’s voice[s]: strategies of translation across the borders of genre and nation","authors":"Mark Fleishman","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2019.1616607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2019.1616607","url":null,"abstract":"Over more than a decade from the year 2000, I engaged in a project to translate the short stories of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto to the stage. This work resulted in the production Voices Made Night different versions of which were performed in Cape Town, Grahamstown, Maputo and Edinburgh between 2000 and 2013. Mia Couto has developed a new and deeply creative literary language based in the African oral tradition and on African transformations of Portuguese. The stories have been translated into English by David Brookshaw and these are the versions from which the stage production departed. Part of the ongoing project has been to discover ways in which to make the stories align with the particular context of their original creation, and to migrate this context and the particularities of the linguistic register employed in the original versions to audiences in other countries, initially in Africa but also in other parts of the world. The article recounts the experience of the director trying to engage Mia Couto directly regarding the work of translation as an indication of the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of ever being able to reach back to the original author in the process. It explores the specific translation strategies employed in the performance project and argues for a focus on voice as a marker of singularity. It argues that paying attention to prosodic effect leads to an idiomatic affect that, in turn, gives rise to a strangeness in the theatrical encounter between stage and audience. It suggests that such a strangeness must be dwelt in rather than overcome, as a way to refuse an easy crossing of borders between nations and genres in translation and to counter ideas of transparency.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"20 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2019.1616607","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43157290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Translating tragedy: Molora and Yaël Farber’s adaption of Aeschylus’ Oresteia for the South African community","authors":"K. Röttger","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2019.1615845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2019.1615845","url":null,"abstract":"The article takes the case of Yaël Farber’s performance Molora (an adaption of the ancient Greek tragedy Oresteia to the specific historical South African moment of transition to democracy and the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) as a departing point to delve into the question of the translatability of tragedy. With such a proposition in mind, the argument is informed by the relatively new field of cultural translation studies. Against this background, the translatability of the epistemological conditions of the Aristotelian concept of tragedy and its Western legacy will be considered. By proposing to translate the traditional notion of tragedy as literary dramatic genre to conceive of tragedy as event the article will delve into ethical questions concerning the human condition in relation to fate, which enhance guilt, judgement, the collision of force and law and the quest for justice. To connect these questions to tragedy, a distinction has to be made between the ethos of tragedy as an artistic form and the pathos (the grief) of those who experience a disaster or ruin in a situation of everyday life.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"35 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2019.1615845","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44656713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Transfers and transformations from music to theatre in Catherine Makhumula's Mwana Wanga","authors":"C. Makhumula","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2018.1532811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2018.1532811","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I discuss music to performance media transfers and transformations, a lesser-known form of media transposition that has been largely overlooked by scholars in intermedial studies. Through a performance analysis of my own work Mwana Wanga, a theatrical performance derived from a recorded song, I locate the creative process of the theatre project as a critical site for media transposition. I argue that there is a complex process of transfer and transformation of media from Dearest Child to Mwana Wanga and that a systematic reflection of the creative process uncovers the mechanisms of these transfers and transformations from music to theatrical performance. The article intends to situate music-to-performance transpositions in the intermedial discourse and also clarify the methodological design that enables the study of transfers and transformations in the creative process.","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"31 1","pages":"185 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2018.1532811","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45321563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The model as performance: staging space in theatre and architecture","authors":"Sarah Roberts","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2018.1509492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2018.1509492","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"335 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2018.1509492","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45730034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Your breath in art: acting from within","authors":"F. Ramsay","doi":"10.1080/10137548.2018.1505097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2018.1505097","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42236,"journal":{"name":"South African Theatre Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"321 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10137548.2018.1505097","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41324150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}