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Embodied mis-translations
What does it mean to engage translation theory in relation to practices of embodiment, where text is no longer taken for-granted as the primary site of meaning and exchange? Literature from the discipline of translation studies generally takes it a given that the primary locus of practice rests on spoken or written text. Engaging with it, I feel like an interloper, I wonder about my method. What I find most necessary and valuable about practice-led research is the way in which it potentially disrupts the linear, Cartesian legacies of writing in academic english to allow space for forms of knowledge grounded in cultures of making, embodiment, affect and thinking through doing. Almost all the work in translation studies that I have read invisibil- ises bodies – it adheres to the travel of languages in books, cities, political events, nations – institutions both public and private. Thinking translation through embodiment allows a disruption in expectations of what translation is, allows space for considering affective spaces and feeling states in a way that not only registers their existence, but allows material ar- ticulation – through visual, graphic, digital or written means.
This book aims to provide an example of translation as a method for creative practice re- search, of use to translation theorists in considering how choreographic, embodied, non-linear, affective, and creative practices of translation relate to their field; dance artists, in considering methods of articulating and performing choreographic ideas through practices of experi- mental documentation and movement- initiated writing, and practice-led researchers from diverse fields, in considering translation as a key methodological and critical tool to think- through the movement of ideas between forms, perspectives and disciplinary languages.
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