Bubble revolution: performing translation

This project engages with the process of performing translation. In particular, it is interested in developing strategies that facilitate intelligibility of the play and encounter between the audience and the target audience without the need for domestication. It also looks at the role of non-native speaking actors in staging translation. Moreover, the project explores the potential of theatre translation to impact upon audience’s perception of a foreign culture, on how one interacts with this culture and how one’s perception of oneself is changed through that foreign culture and in position to that foreign culture. Theoretical framework grows out of Lawrence Venuti’s ideas on foreignization and domestication as translation strategies (1998 and 2008) and Marvin Carlson’s adaptation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s term heteroglossia into theatre context (2009).
The project stages Bubble Revolution by a Polish author Julia Holewińska. Holewińska’s text is a manifesto of thirty-something year old Poles who were growing up when Poland emerged from the communist to capitalist era. The text was translated into English by Artur Zapałowski, and the current project focuses on the process of staging and performing the translation. The tools explored so far include a pre-performance exhibition, website, incorporating translation strategies into characterization, live interpreting, actor-audience relationship, immersive elements, storytelling, and use of Polish language. Bubble Revolution aims at being the act of multimedia and multilayered translation that is both linguistic and contextual and simultaneously intelligible and foreignizing. It also wants to reframe the idea of foreign. So far the production was performed in Ireland and the UK: Dublin, Sligo, Canterbury, Edinburgh, and Westport.

Works Cited
Carlson, Marvin, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre, (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2009)
Venuti, Lawrence, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, (London: Routledge, 1998)
—— The translator's Invisibility: a History of Translation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008)