Page 99 - the foreign language of motion

of deliberately allowing that work to mutate as part of a creative practice. Debates circulate among translators concerning the inventive role of this practice: Is the role of the translator to serve, to invent, to stay true, or to make new? Is it somewhere between this set of possibilities?
Central to the conceptualization of translation that runs through this study is the practice of attending to another. This everyday action is loaded with political implications for reaching outside the familiar and recognizing difference. Such an understanding of translation refuses to accept a translation or a document of a performance as secondary to an originary act. Instead each translation is a performance that reinvents a specific creative context. These discussions of translation as an inventive form, the core of which is exchange between cultures echoes my experience of watching movement and writing, the pores of my skin open to the tone of her movement, each element layering upon the other and without knowing how the words scribing paper link to this dance I’m following. I’m miming the act of writing with the hope that the dance will write for me. My job is to attend and to listen, to listen through muscles, nervous system, through each sensory pathway. This practice might be paralleled with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s writing of translation as “the simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self” (Spivak, 2000, p.397). The affect of another’s movement shifts my own sense of embodiment, the trace of the other registers kinesthetically. As a writer, my responsibility in this context is to writing with this movement, via kinesthetic affect.
How does the translator attend to the specificity of the language she translates? ...we are talking of risks, of violence to the translating medium. (Spivak 2000, p. 398)
Consideration of the ethics of translation opens space for a critical investigation of the specific practices utilized to move ideas between forms or languages, between dancing and writing. The kinesthetic archive book entailed a series of translations. Each translation is also a translation of a translation of a translation, from rehearsal planning, to communicating between dancers, to dancers exchanging and developing movement, to the page. In the kinesthetic archive book the translation is also stylistic, in choosing whether to use standard print, choosing a font or handwritten text, in working specifically at the level of the tone, design, layout and register of page surfaces; each of these elements might be considered a translation of meanings. The political and ethical dimensions of the kinesthetic archive book lie in its determination to value affect over linear description. As Caspão writes:
Affect functions as a “critical point” insofar as it can dismantle legitimate orders of discourse as well as definite relations between words, bodies, minds, actions, and objects (Caspão, 2008, p.144).
This project (both in the solo performance and the book project) attempts, as Caspão puts it, to ‘dismantle 73