Jess McCormack

Creativity and translation: Dancing words

Practices of translation are intrinsic to all choreographic processes. Choreographers and movement directors have always experimented with ways to take a source material – whether that is a written text, a painting, a musical score, or a narrative – and turn it in to a choreographed production. This paper will bring together the fields of Dance Studies, Translation Studies, and Adaptation Studies to explore how dance artists working at the intersections of dance and theatre conceptualise the process of translating text/other sources into movement. This paper will include a discussion of my interviews with Hannes Langolf examining DV8 Physical Theatre’s approaches to translation verbatim interview material into choreographed movement material.  Translation Studies scholars have considered the relationship between translation and creativity. Translation Studies scholar O’Sullivan has focused on examining the relationship between constraint and creativity in the translation process; Tymoczko has argued that in collaborative group translation methods the translator’s role is adding new meaning to a source text; Perteghella and Loffredo have theorised translation as a creative activity; Szymanska has explored the notion of ‘translation multiples’; Park, Pilippou, Reynolds and Vitali's have discussed theories concerning prismatic translation; Scott has developed an understanding of translation as a process that allows the translator ‘to embody an experience of reading’;  and Lefevere has examined translation as a process of rewriting. In this paper I aim to explore how theories located in Translation Studies might illuminate artistic practices. Discussing the research and development process for To Be Straight With You, Newson (2007) explains that, ‘The themes behind this production are complex, sensitive and not easily translated into movement’. This paper explores in what ways for DV8 Physical Theatre, translation has become a dramaturgical device / a choreographic practice.

Bio: 

Dr Jess McCormack, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, University of Bristol. 

Current research focuses on adaptation and translation in live and digital performance practice and applied and collaborative performance practices. 

Recent Publications: 

Choreography & Verbatim Theatre: Dancing words (Palgrave Macmillan) 

‘Dancing Diffraction’, Performance Research, 25:5, 77-83, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2020.1868847