Intercultural Theatre: Renegotiating Time and Place in Drama Translation

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how time and place have become two key concepts according to which the translations of plays may be gauged in a new intercultural perspective. ‘Intercultural theatre’ has been a somewhat controversial term with a long history and there have been various attempts to define how cultures and texts interact and what role is played by translation in such a process (Fischer-Lichte 1989, 1990a, 1990b; Pavis 1992; Pavis 1996; Aaltonen 2000). Patrice Pavis, in dealing with the way theatre practitioners and translators view another culture, sees interculturality as an interpretative relation in the passage from one semiotic system into another. The mechanism of cultural appropriation of another reality thus lies in evaluating the distance between source and target culture. The same evaluating principle regulates drama translation. Pavis singles out three different attitudes which can be adopted towards the source text. The first chooses, as far as possible, to maintain allusions to the source culture in the translation, accentuating the differences between source text and target culture. The second attempts to adapt the source text entirely to the target culture, almost to the extent that the target culture no longer understands the origin of the source text. The third favours a compromise, resulting in a translation which mediates between proximity and distance. In this last case, both the source and target cultures and texts are seen as ‘connecting vessels’ (vases communicants) (Pavis 1989: 38). It is interesting to note the various metaphors which have been used to describe drama translation from an intercultural viewpoint. In addition to the above-mentioned ‘connecting vessels’, in which two cultures and two texts are connected, drama translation has been seen as being ‘at crossroads’ of cultures, as a ‘labyrinth’, where different theatre traditions and practices meet and mingle (Pavis1992; Bassnett 1985, 1998) or, finally, as ‘an hourglass’, where “each grain or element of the source culture has to be turned upside down in order to arrive at the target culture” (Pavis 1992). Despite Pavis’ benign definition of interculturalism as “the dialectic of exchange of civilities between cultures” (Pavis 1992), the processes of intercultural exchange however have not been easy in Western theatre. As Bharucha points out, interculturalism has more than often meant cultural expropriation, a “borrowing without acknowledgment” (Verma 1996), which is based on the unequal power relations of postcolonialism. In order to come to terms with the conflicting views proposed by Pavis and Bharucha, Cameron uses the notion of ‘tradaptation’ (translation/adaptation) and concretely illustrates the processes implied in this new form of interculturality (Cameron 2000). He draws specifically on the writing of Jatinder Verma, the Artistic Director of the Asian Tara Arts Theatre Company, and focuses on an aesthetic practice called ‘Binglish’ and a social context termed ‘jungli’. Therefore, ‘Binglish’ and ‘jungli’ may be argued to be the best exemplification of how traditional notions of time and place have been renegotiated in drama translation.