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Mis-translations
For dance theorist Sally Gardner (2014) mis-translation is part of the life-blood of contemporary choreography. She draws on philosopher Laurence Louppe to discuss the difference between “the ‘setting’ of work by a ballet master, and the agitation of ‘matter’ that is the work of a contemporary choreographer” (234). Gardner discusses how the “dancer plays a role in this unsettling because a contemporary dance composition is, in the first instance, composed from the unique matter of the specific dancers” (Louppe, cited in Gardner, 2014,
p. 234). Gardner discusses the conceptual difference between acts of transmission and
acts of translation, drawing specifically on the contemporary restaging of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal work Trio A, through what Rainer calls ‘custodians’ – “willing dancers who are charged by Rainer with passing on Trio A now that she herself no longer can or no longer wishes to be directly involved in this activity” (Gardner, 2014, p. 233). Gardner explains how
the job of these custodians is to work as ‘transmitters’ of choreography and comes to the conclusion that “the dancer-transmitter did not or should not influence the message he or
she was transmitting” (p.235) and draws on Paul Ricouer to discuss the difference between transmission and translation, in which “work is advanced with some salvaging and some acceptance of loss” (Ricoeur, 2006, cited by Gardner, p. 235). For Gardner, translation connotes practices of creating, investing, risk, invention, agitation and movement. When this active, risky performance of translation shifts to a transmission practice of movement replication, Gardner describes how she finds she “lost some interest in Trio A” and concludes;
Choreographic invention lives at least in part by the ongoing mistranslations between the dancer and the choreographer and their urge to keep trying. In terms of a work’s survival through time, the idea of translation keeps alive the dancing presence of dance, which is what is most easily lost or becomes relatively untranslatable. The dancer’s role in translating, but also in mistranslating, spurs repetition and, potentially, insights and discoveries, allowing future dancers to be writers. The idea of a transmitter may contain the dream of a faultless remembering, but at the risk of some cost to the depth and complexity in the modern dance conception, and practices, of the dancer. (Gardner, 2014, p. 235)
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