Translating Performance by Diana Taylor

This article was written in reaction to the Second Annual Encuentro where the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics brought together artists, activists and scholars to talk about how they approached politics through performance. It's focus was on how the word performance couldn't be directly translated which left many people confused as to the exact nature of their work. For any linguists out there, it's a very interesting article, discussing the nuances in meaning between performance and words such as representation, theatricality, etc. I came across it trying to research techniques on how to convey meaning when your audience doesn't speak the language you're using in your performance.

Taylor's view on performance (the author, not myself) : "[p]erformances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated...behavior" (44).

I found the debate on whether by its revelatory nature, performance is a revealer of culture or whether by it's constructed nature, it's artificial to be very interesting.  Taylor argues against the second idea saying that just because "a dance, a ritual, or a political demonstration requires bracketing or framing that differentiates it from other social practices surrounding it does not imply that the performance is not real or true. On the contrary, the idea that performance distills a truer truth than life itself runs from Aristotle, through Shakespeare, and Calderon de la Barca, through Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, and into the present." (46) [italics added] I agree when thinking of dance under the umbrella term performance. Because of the abstract nature of dance, the form needs to be constructed but it doesn't make the content any less real.


Quotes:

"As its different uses - scholarly, political, scientific, business-related - rarely engage one another directly, performance also has a history of untranslatability. It has been locked ironically into the disciplinary and geographic boxes it defies, denied the universality and transparency that some claim it promises its objects of analysis. the many points of untranslatability are of course what make the term and the practices theoretically enabling and culturally revealing. While performances may not, as Turner has hoped, give us access and insight into another culture, they certainly tell us a great deal about our desire for efficacy and accesss, not to mention the politics of our interpretations." (47)

I really liked this quote (above) because it alludes to the self-reflexive side of performance. In watching performances from other cultures, maybe it's not what it's revealing to you about their culture so much as what you're realizing about your own through comparison.

"Performance carries the possibility of challenge, even self-challenge, within it." (49)