Negotiating Translation

Haresh delivered a keynote presentation titled Negotiating Translation: Case Studies of Multilingual Playwriting and Theatre-making at the 2013 Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) conference Staging Changes: Translation as Innovation and Intervention.

There were individual presentations, panels, workshops and performances that explored translation in theatre, drama and performance as pivotal to innovation and intervention. Translating or adapting a work from another culture, or transposing a piece from one medium to another, has traditionally reflected how we imagine and represent unifying identities: cultural, national, regional, ethnic, or linguistic. However, these practices also allow us to stage change by historicising, localising and interpreting individual and communal experiences in a multicultural setting.

To promote a dialogue between creative practice and critical reflection, this conference considered the opportunities translation and adaptation present for creating and disrupting collective identities, and for diversifying mainstream audiences and performance practices. The conference interrogated both the possibility and impossibility of translation, its achievements and failures in (re)ordering and (dis)locating individual and collective desires and destinies.