Performing Heteroglossia: The 'Translating Theatre' Project in London

Laera, Margherita (2018) Performing Heteroglossia: The 'Translating Theatre' Project in London. Modern Drama, 61 (3). ISSN 0026-7694. E-ISSN 1712-5286. (doi:10.3138/md.s0917)

Abstract

London is home to more than eight million people who speak more than three hundred languages, but the theatre scene in the British capital far from adequately represents this cultural richness and diversity. London theatre remains predominantly white, British, middle-class, and performed in the standard London dialect and accent combination. In the first part of this article I offer a contextualization and classification of types of heteroglossia available to London theatre-goers. In the second part, I describe my research project "Translation, Adaptation, Otherness: 'Foreignisation' in Theatre Practice". The aim of the project was to investigate new strategies in theatre translation that would enable us to disrupt audience expectation and challenge ethnocentrism. In this article, I assess the difficulties we encountered and the audience's response to our experiments. The project offered many timely opportunities to interrogate perceptions of "foreignness" among London-based theatre-makers, scholars, and spectators, immediately following the "Brexit" referendum vote.

Item Type:	Article
DOI/Identification number:	10.3138/md.s0917
Uncontrolled keywords:	heteroglossia, theatre, translation, accent, dialect, foreignization
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1655 Drama P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theatre
Divisions:	Faculties > Humanities > School of Arts > Drama and Theatre
Depositing User:	Margherita Laera
Date Deposited:	25 Jul 2017 11:24 UTC
Last Modified:	17 Jul 2019 23:00 UTC
Resource URI:	https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/62385 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)
Laera, Margherita:	https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4385-3444