Page 19 - radio strainer

Wishy Washy Washing: Notes on Mangling
One of the first things one learns in attempting to climb The Faraway Tree, is to be ready to dodge the buckets of water tipped from branches above by Dame Washalot.
“They listened. It sounded like a waterfall – and suddenly Dick guessed what it was.
‘It’s Dame Washalot throwing out her dirty water!, he yelled. Look out Beth! Look out Fannie!’” (Blyton, DATE, p.)
Our rehearsal process is aligned with Sally Gardner’s assertion that mistranslation is part of
the lifeblood of contemporary dance - this allows the movement of ideas in processes of mistake, disruption, difference and discovery. We stick to mistranslation as our methodological compass – developing practices of improvisation, documentation, choreography, and reflection. How might these embodied, tangential, non-linear practices relate to the established field of translation studies? Andrew Pickering’s concept of the mangle of practice (1998) offers a f’;amework for considering and examining the way different research processes shape each other in the play between intention, materiality and time in the production of knowledge. Pickering contextualizes his work in the field of science, but, as he points out in his book, it is adaptable to diverse fields of knowledge production (Pickering, 1995, p.34). Literally, a mangle is an old-fashioned device for wringing the water out of laundry. It is both noun and verb – ideas are “mangled” between various forces. When the ideal forms of our imagination meet the brute reality of the possible a ‘dance of agency’ ensues, wherein both human and non-human are understood as open-endedly becoming”(Pickering, 1995).
Creating Radio Strainer involves a kind of metaphysical washing, a wringing of ideas and a disorientatinig and often unpleasant spill of sweaty, unusable material which no one really wants. With helpful feedback from showings, we chuck the cloudy material into the air, and carry on with the mangled, worked and re-worked material left before us. It is certainly an (often disheartening) dance of agency, in which I resignedly play the role of Dame Washalot.
6
7