Lessons of Decal (Language as Repertoire)

• Published in: Performance research 2024-01, Vol.29 (1), p.66-69
• Main Author: Seita, Sophie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Knowledge; Reading; Translations
• ISSN: 1352-8165; 1469-9990
• DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2024.2408116

For a long time, I’ve been thinking about performance as a form of translation; or rather: I’ve adapted things I’ve learned from translation theory and applied that knowledge to performance. For example, I learned that a text or an artwork has many voices, not just the one ‘true’ and unchanging original. I learned that any act of translation creates a second original (and undoes that hierarchy). I learned that this dialogue with what has come before, which we copy or follow closely, even as we may resist it, push back against it or surf athletically on the back of it, is something to be cherished as deeply political. I learned how to pay attention to difference, which I must encounter (not necessarily identify with), but bring into my own voice (which is my body) in translation. How do we acknowledge the multiple ‘acts of transfer’ in our practice? How do we make sense of and make known these major or minor transformations, the things that move around, across materials? For me, this transformation, this transfer, often happens through reading. And not the kind of quiet, distant reading, but the kind that obsesses over something. A reading that makes itself known, through citation, through recycling other people’s and my own (worn) words. I mean ‘worn’ in the sense of showing its ‘use’ but also in the sense of literally wearing words. Re-using words, and objects, and words-as-objects, as costumes, as stages, displacing them, misplacing them into a related or unrelated context.