Spanish and Spanish American Theatres in Translation: a Virtual Environment for Research

Spanish and Spanish American Theatres in Translation: A Virtual Environment for Research and Practice

Case for Support

This project seeks to provide the English-language theatre professional – critic, historian, practitioner – with a range and quality of access to Spanish-language theatre that is fit for professional purpose. A ‘virtual Spanish-language theatre environment’, designed to emulate a ‘real’ theatre environment – that is, the body of knowledge that informs and sustains professional practice within a specific culture - will be configured by the creation and digital storage of a series of ‘knowledges’ of the drama, the theatre traditions, and the performance methodologies and theories that have developed in the Hispanic world since the 17th century. The resulting website/database will, in its first phase at least, be structured around the three key areas and moments of Spanish-language theatre – the Spanish Golden Age, modern Spain, and Spanish America.

The resource will be established through a corpus of around 100 plays in each area. Each play will be contextualized through synopsis, sample translation, production notes, critical responses and performance history. This will enable users to reach an informed decision as to the ‘utility’ of any particular play to the projects in which they are engaged. Users will have at their disposal a rigorously investigated and carefully contextualized resource that, in this way, is centrally concerned to enable the production and further dissemination of theatre writing, research and practice.

The sustainability of such a resource is key. In this case, the sustainability of the website/database is integral to the nature, indeed the ethos, of the project itself. A group of contributors and editors will be established in the early stages of the project, initially to act as a pilot user community, latterly to ensure the continuing development of the resource.

Within the specific scope of this project, the resource will be used to develop a series of approaches both to issues of writing translations for performance, and of performing plays in translation. In that way, the project will lead to further outputs by way of traditional academic publications and symposia, and of productions.

Research Questions or Problems

Theatre practitioners and scholars have access to a number of web-based resources linked to Spanish theatre. All of these are incomplete (this is true even in the case of the most apparently specialist sites, such as that of the Centro Latinoamericano de Creación e Investigación the comedia websites hosted by the AHCT, or by Matthew Stroud at and now appear static. Crucially too, they lack contextualization. In terms of the resource it will provide, this project presents Spanish theatre as a cultural practice, privileging performance and the potential for performance over textual recording. The primary problem in this regard is the creation of a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of knowledges blend to present Spanish theatre as a cultural practice embedded in cultural history, change and memory. The reception group for this project will be both, in the words of Stanley Fish, ‘an interpretive community’, and one that interacts with the resource, providing feedback, bringing new perspectives and knowledge to bear. In other words, the resource will be framed in such a way as to invite interpretation, interaction and, ultimately, creative and scholarly use.

In order to facilitate such interpretation, the focus of this project will be not solely on what may be, or has been, performed, but also, crucially, upon the means of achieving that performance. This goes beyond the standard accoutrements of the mise-en-scene, important though these elements are in terms of complementing user knowledge. In the case of playtexts translated from another place and, in most cases, from other times, performance is clearly conditioned both by the signs and systems of another theatre culture, and by the process of translation itself - specifically by how that process is conceptualized by the translator (here the whole panoply of labels from ‘translation’ to ‘adaptation’ to ‘new version out of…’ all denote different, if as yet poorly defined, translation praxes). Integral to the project therefore are:

• investigation into the theatre practices that contextualize the original plays;
• study of the process of moving the plays from their source culture into a target culture that will, in the first instance at least, be that of the English-speaking world.

In addition to the establishment of this enabling resource, with the attendant issues of how our corpus will be selected, how it will be contextualized, and how it will best mobilise its own active user-community, the project will explore the following research questions that arise from the issues noted above:

• Cultural Awareness and Transmission: how might the repertoire of English-language theatre be enriched by this resource? Following on from initial but generalized studies by Aaltonen: 2001 and Andermann: 2006, the project investigates the issues that prompt one theatrical culture to import plays from another? How do those imports profile and expand the receiving culture, in terms of both practice and criticism? Even a quick overview of performance criticism of Spanish-language plays in English reveals that writers are much more willing to consider them as being more culturally ‘other’ than plays from, for example, France, Germany, Greece, or Italy;
• Reception: how does an audience react to a play in translation? Using the notion of ‘conceptual blending’ (Fauconnier and Turner: 2004), the project will assess how the sort of textual hybridity that emerges from the intercultural and intertemporal practices of stage translation develops or inhibits reception;
• Translation and Performance: what scope is there for asserting a model of performability as a key value of the translation process? Very specifically, the project will look at polemical issues such as ‘literal’ translation, and will address these through developing methodologies for cultural and linguistic negotiation. In short, it considers translation as a hermeneutic act, and interrogates it as such.
• Historiography and Historicity: in what ways might the re-creative strategies of a translation process alive to the historicity of cultural memory (following on from Mieke Bal et al) both complement traditional theatre historiography and enable the development of the ‘foreign’ Lope, Calderón etc (by analogy with Kennedy’s ‘foreign’ Shakespeare)?

The project therefore questions and will revise descriptive and product-based analyses of the role of translation in theatre. It recognises and addresses the need to develop models for understanding both the translation process, and in particular the strategies for embedding performativity into the translator’s practice, and the ways in which translated texts position themselves within the receiving theatre culture.

Research Context

The project finds its immediate context in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s multi-award winning season The Spanish Golden Age (2004-05). All three investigators worked on this season as academic advisors, with Johnston and Boyle writing the translations for two of the plays (The Dog in the Manger and House of Desires). In April 2005 a symposium on Language and Meaning in the Staging of Golden Age Drama in English was held at King’s College, London. It was notable for its unusual mix of theatre practitioners and scholars. This same creative fusion is evident in the edited volume of essays The Spanish Golden Age in English; Perspectives on Performance that derived from that symposium and which is currently in press with Oberon (who published the four plays that made up the RSC season).

This experience – perhaps one of the most successful collaborations ever between academics and theatre practitioners – afforded the opportunity for the exploration of key issues of translation and reception. These in turn formed the basis of the symposium and the book, and were further developed in subsequent symposia, held in King’s in January 2007, and scheduled for the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London, in November 2007. All three investigators were deeply involved with the creative, the audience-based, and the reflective/academic strands of activity that together configured the RSC season. The process opened up an important space for collaboration between the academy and theatre practice, and initiated a successful working methodology that our subsequent activities have sought to build upon.

The impact of the season has been felt in a number of inter-related ways in both the ambit of professional theatre and the academic world. Johnston’s and Boyle’s translations have been revived both nationally and internationally – principally in the United States - and there is now an incipient sense among Hispanists of the ‘foreign Lope’, for example. Evidence for this comes from a variety of sources. Although not a traditional Lope scholar, for example, Johnston has, unusually, been invited to contribute to the prestigious Companion to Lope de Vega (to be published in 2008 by Tamesis) and all three investigators have contributed essays to The Comedia in English (eds Donald Larson and Susan Paun García, to be published in 2007, also by Tamesis).

However, two fundamental impediments occur. On one hand, while there is a clear hunger within British and American theatre for Spanish-language plays in general, there is insufficient resource to undertake the enormously expensive process of research and development that was carried out by the RSC. The result is that the repertoire of Spanish-language plays performed in English remains static, while, by the same token, the range and quality of informed debate as to the new potentialities offered by the performance of these plays in English is inhibited. Furthermore, at the level of criticism, the need to understand the process of translation, as it embeds itself into the here and now of performance, tends to be neglected in favour of a text-based criticism that ignores the contexts of performance that are defining elements of theatre. This project seeks to address both of these impediments by creating an inter-active and continuously renewing catalogue of Spanish-language theatre that is contextualized culturally, historically and conceptually.

The broader context to the project lies in the work of the three investigators. By different routes, they have developed a knowledge base and critical expertise that covers the three areas of theatre production in the Hispanic World: Thacker through his work on the history of performance in the Spanish Golden Age and the history of the comedia, Johnston through his acclaimed translations of both Golden Age and modern Spanish-language drama, and his theoretical work on translation and performance, and Boyle through her work on methodologies for the study of performance, cultural transmission, and the translation of Latin American theatre.

The context for the ‘virtual theatre environment’ is rooted in the theatre language of both modern Spain and Spanish America, where key practitioners such as García Lorca in Spain and the pioneers of modern drama in Spanish America saw the need to create ‘un ambiente teatral’, a theatre environment that would serve to modernize the dramatic art in their countries, create artistic and intellectual awareness of, and dialogue with, international theatre, both classical and modern, and develop from that a recognized professional theatre and real stagecraft. In order to achieve this, they collected and performed plays from the international canon, introducing audiences to them and ‘training’ them in the means of understanding and appreciating this variety of theatrical experience. This process of building such a theatre environment is deeply rooted in research, practice and dissemination in ways that this project seeks to emulate.

Research Methods

This project will assess the issues and questions raised above through a programme of collaborative research. At all times the research process will derive from the database, although we anticipate that the database will also excite new research that will inform and inflect the process we are setting out here. This process is rooted in detailed analysis of translation as a complex theatre practice involving:

• programming (choice of text);
• process (table work and rehearsal-room practice);
• reception (encompassing significantly different end-users);
• criticism.

The core ethos of the project is that practice and theory are mutually illuminating, while its core methodology centres on the related ideas of translation as a creative process and the commensurability of cultures (in particular, of course, of theatre cultures). There is much key work that will be taken into account here (for the former idea, from thinkers as distinct as Wittgenstein and Derrida, for the latter from cultural theorists such as Iser and Buddick), and much of the early work of the team will be to integrate that work into a coherent model of analysis upon which this project will be predicated.

By working closely with a network of theatres (both building and company-based) the team will assess the processes by which foreign-language plays are programmed (which, as yet, account for only around 15% of professional productions in Great Britain: source Theatre Record). A particularly exciting aspect of this project is that it promises to reach new insights into how foreign-language plays are perceived by theatre practitioners and audiences alike. A series of performances and rehearsed readings will be closely monitored – through observation, post-production interviews, and questionnaires – allowing for a multiplicity of views to be folded into a holistic analysis of the experience and perceptions of ‘foreignness’ in general, and in particular how Spanish-language theatre culture challenges the expectations of theatre practitioners and audiences in the English-speaking world.

In this way, the project will not only enrich our knowledge of how translation functions as a writing practice but also of how it influences the conditions of its own reception in the cultural practice of theatre-making. The project thus offers an opportunity to make a telling contribution to issues that are centre-stage in current translation and performance studies, as well as fostering ever closer relations between the world of professional theatre and academic Hispanism.

Project Management

The project is designed as a three-year collaboration, managed by Boyle as PI, in conjunction with the expertise of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College. She will liaise with Johnston and Thacker who, respectively, will manage their own centres. Each centre will have its own postdoctoral research assistant who will be responsible for:

• selecting information and inputting it into the website/database;
• ensuring and monitoring the inter-activity sponsored and enabled by the website;
• undertaking preliminary research into specific research questions, as appropriate to existing expertise within each centre, to be disseminated as set out below.

The PDRAs will be appointed six months into the project, once the knowledge structure of the electronic resource has been established, and modes and processes of inputting agreed, and will begin work on populating the database and website created by the King’s team. One PhD student will be appointed at the outset so that s/he is given ample opportunity to variously exploit and extend the team’s knowledge base, theoretical expertise, and practical skills. Members will be expected to work as a team and there will be a constant exchange of information and experience between the three centres. This will be enabled electronically, through a research portal that will be established at the beginning of the project, and by a series of scheduled meetings and symposia. After initial training and induction meetings, held in London, quarterly review meetings will be held on a rotating basis to monitor progress in the light of clearly defined research objectives and milestones.

The Technical Director will oversee the work of the TRS, who will develop the entire technical framework for the project as described in the TA.

Prior to application / Team has organised three symposia:
-An encounter between practitioners and academic theorists to assess the validity of the methodology of the RSC Spanish Golden Age Season, leading to the publication of a co-edited volume
-A consultation with targeted users of the database resource – practitioners and academics
-A conference on translation as process geared to performance, with participation of leading international theorists (Aaltonen, Kennedy, inter alia)
-Advisory group established, comprising international
scholars with relevant expertise. This advisory group
will also act as referees and co-editors for further
volumes.
-Network of practitioners formalised, comprising leading theatre companies (inter alia RSC, National Theatre, Lyric Belfast, Edinburgh Traverse Theatre), trainers and educational programmes (RADA, Drama at Queen’s University) and theatre publishers (Oberon, London and Caos Editorial, Madrid)
1-12 months / -User community established
-PDRAs appointed, trained and, under supervision of the three investigators, identify textual corpora and input twenty items each
-PhD student appointed
-First phase of database established.
- Investigation of corpus in relation to translation, users, performance and reception contexts
-Launch, with first workshop, involving three investigators, PDRAs, key practitioners
-3 rehearsed readings planned
end of Year 1 / -Network of relationships formed and functioning as pilot body for website and database
-Methodology of database identified, piloted and 20% of corpus published electronically
-3 rehearsed readings take place and analysed
-Selected research adapted for publication as articles and essays
-Individual monographs begun
-Database expanded to include human resources (translators, practitioners etc)
-International Symposium on Translation and
Performance 1: Reception and Textual Hybridity
organized and hosted in London. Co-edited refereed
volume of essays shaped from this conference
- doctoral thesis begun
13-24 months / -Full implementation of interactive aspects of project
website
-3 further rehearsed readings planned
-International symposium on Translation and
Performance 2: Historiography and Historicity
organized and hosted in Oxford Co-edited refereed
volume of essays shaped from this conference
- Volume of essays published
end of Year 2 / -3 rehearsed readings take place and analysed
-Publication of annotated playtexts
- Further contextualization and expansion of database
25-36 months / -1 performance takes place and analysed
-Publication of annotated playtexts
- Volume of essays published
- International Symposium on Translation and
Performance 3: The Grammars of Performance
organized and hosted in Belfast. Co-edited refereed
volume of essays shaped from this conference
-Individual monographs completed
-Database completed
-PhD completed -
end of Year 3 / - Doctoral student presents paper at symposium
-1 performances take place and analysed
-Publication of annotated playtexts
- Further contextualization and expansion of database
Post application / - Volume of essays published
- Project evaluated
- Community of contributors confirmed
- Monographs published

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