Scenes of Translation: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy

In the last decades, performers on European and US-American stages have tended to speak explicitly on behalf of others instead of portraying them. Those privileged enough to take the stage often do so in order to turn it into a political arena for making their voices heard and interweaving them with the voices of others through the strategies of narration, translation or reporting. For many of these politically engaged productions—which reach from performances of auto-fictional speech and re-writing to Institutional Critique and decolonization—the notion of translation may offer an operative conceptual framework. Looking at a variety of examples, such as Lupita Pulpo, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, William Pope. L, Ibrahim Quaraishi and Satch Hoyt, I will explore contemporary dramaturgies of representation as a form of translation, which I will define, drawing on Walter Benjamin, as a form of repetition that is necessary and impossible at the same time. Inspired by Gayatri Spivak’s notion of ‘postcolonial translation’ and Fred Moten’s concept of ‘nonperformance,’ I will focus on staging strategies that relate experiences from the history of colonialization which resist naturalistic ways of representation or reenactment, developing instead dramaturgies of translation.