Review of Contemporary Performance Translation. Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Stage. Jean Graham-Jones, Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Reviewed by Catherine Boyle, King’s College London Catherine.boyle@kcl.ac.uk

At the very beginning of Contemporary Performance Translation. Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Stage, Jean Graham-Jones’ celebrates translation as a collaborative practice. The book then goes on to share with us the development of the author’s collaborative practice, “the culmination of a career-long devotion to the inseparability of artistic practice and critical reflection” (ix). This is a book that is imbued with intellectual and creative generosity, taking the reader on a journey through Graham-Jones’s practice that, as the title suggests, challenges ways of thinking about performance and translation, and proposes ways in which we enact translation knowledge and practice in different environments.

It would be an injustice to define the term “translational” here, but key to understanding it as practice and process is Graham-Jones’ early insistence on how the “translational works conceptually and practically to retain copresence and multidirectionality so that translations do not erase the so-called original but rather stand in relation to other texts and performances” (5). Setting the scene, the introduction and first chapter (“Translationality in Performance”) lead the reader in a consideration of some of the dominant theories around translation and performance translation. What distinguishes this work from other such accounts is a profound sense of engagement with global voices, so that we are immediately beyond certain orthodoxies of thought and practice and engaging with the ideas of theorists with the capacity to shift the axis of our thinking and with practitioners who enact translationality as a collaborative performance practice. Chapter Two, simply put, is a sharing of the development of Graham-Jones’ translational practice through her collaborations with Argentine dramatists Claudio Tolcachir, Lola Arias and Rafael Spregelburd. With the evocative ideas of “The Over-translated, the Under-translated, the Untranslatable, and the Limits of Performance Translation”, the chapter is a brilliant insight into the ways in which the author has travelled with the complexities of the specific demands of each play and performance and has worked with the processes across time and in different contexts. The sense of the development of practice is enlightening, and there is a real density (in the best sense of the word) in the understanding of the demands of each play, of how they work in different locations, of how with questions of the translational approach might guide the collaborative process in the new site of encounter, the place where the negotiations of co-presence and multidirectionality take place.

Then, in Chapter 3, “Translationality and the Atypical Actor in Performance”, Graham-Jones opens up the possibilities of thinking through the translational approach. Rooted again in the author’s practice, the chapter tests the approach in relation to “the performer’s own body – mine and others’ – as a collaboratively translational site” (89). Thinking primarily of the “atypical actor”, this chapter is an exploration of how “translation can be thought differently – other than as metaphor or method – when considering performers with multiple and varied, visible and invisible, abilities” (88). The approach, following Donna Marie Nudd’s challenge to an “ethic of accommodation” (94), proposes demanding changes to core ways of working with disability. While placing her practice in the context of different models of disability, Graham-Jones’ account demonstrates the work involved in opening routes and spaces of difference in scenarios of inclusion and integration. One example is how “access devices” are fully integrated into the imagined mise-en-scène and a play’s “fundamental dramaturgy” (99). The final chapter, “Translationality and the Decolonial Gesture in Performance” proposes translationality as an inherently decolonial gesture. Following complex traces of the performance and reception of racial and ethnic constructions, Graham-Jones again uses her own experience, this time as a spectator, to guide the reader through performance aesthetics, contexts and moments of change in Argentine theatre, aware of the “discontinuities, ruptures, and dismantlings” (121) of the decolonial gesture. The power of the chapter lies in the way Graham-Jones’ considerable scholarship meets her consciousness of experiential and intellectual subjectivity and the constant need to be aware of our own positionality. Here, we see the enactment of the author’s insistence throughout on translational multiplicity, on moving in many directions, open to challenge, obstacles and, at times, to failures. Translationality opens us up to the potential in these experiences.

I had the great pleasure of hearing Jean Graham-Jones present this book at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in London, UK. Her presentation was characterised by the inclusive way in which she brought her audience into her thinking and practice. It was then a delight to turn to a book that is rich in connections, placing scholarly knowledge in the multiplicity of collaborative actions that performance for translation demands. For scholars and practitioners new to the field, the early chapters are a brilliant guide to a wide range of thinking and practice on translation and performance. For scholars who know the field, the revisiting of theories will be a welcome challenge. The later chapters push the boundaries of the field of translation, demonstrating how a translational approach can help us to find the languages and ways of working that actively look in multiple ways to shape our practice. The book is full of inspiring instances of how to move beyond the textual in translation and is translational in its agile movement across disciplines and practice and its evidencing of the complexity, challenges and potential of the approach. Contemporary Performance Translation. Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Stage is a fascinating and enlightening account of a life’s work as educator, academic, translator, performer, theatre spectator, all of which feed into the experiences from which the analysis arises. This is the multiplicity of scholarship at its more illuminating – an invitation to revisit theory and practice, to read again, to find new interlocutors and to engage in a translational way, conscious of the labour involved in ever-changing “sites of encounter” where “the local negotiations are never-ending” (5). The book is a precious offering to our interlocking scholarly worlds.

Catherine Boyle is Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at King’s College London. She is the Director of the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking, which is dedicated to the promotion of teaching and research in languages. She also directs the Out of the Wings Collective, an international meeting space for research into and the translation and performance of theatre in the languages of the global Iberian world. She has published widely on Latin American literature and culture and has translated and produced Latin American theatre.