Estrategias Metodológicas de la Comprensión de Lectura

The project approached translation as a process of filtered transformation of material that was itself highly creative in managing superfluous meaning and cultural gaps. This process consisted of multiple stages of translation. For a conceptualisation of translation, the project drew on thoughts advanced by Walter Benjamin and further developed by Barbara Johnson and Homi Bhabha. In his reflections on translation, Benjamin states that the original is never identical with its translation but instead sees the translation as produced through processes of transformation and reformation (1972: 12). Explicating Benjamin's ideas, Johnson points toward a retrospective construction of the original through the translation: in order to identify the original as original, the translation needs to be different (2003: 40). Post- colonial readings as well as contemporary criticism of approaches to translation illustrate this aspect well, and question normative Eurocentric notions derived from a narrow Roman-Greek tradition that have been applied globally in transcultural transfer up until today (Tymoczko, 2006: 14). Both Johnson and Benjamin emphasise that a translation, though related, is not identical to the original. In an appreciation of Johnson's approach, it is more plausible to speak of the original as 'missed' by the translation, culminating in a view on translation as a process of gradual deformation or disfiguration. The deformation process that is translation deconstructs the "precarious appearance of unity" of the original that was achieved by a mastering of the language of the original (Johnson, 2003: 61). In translation, this unity necessarily comes undone. This idea of progressive failure that

aspects voiced in the interviews through their own perspective on crisis and their own creative language to relate this experience. In a studio environment, we were concerned with asking ourselves how much the body gives away of that which it experiences, for example through illness, obesity, pregnancy, and scarring. On a different level, we were eager to explore the potential connective tissue between diverse somatic experiences, much like specific words or concepts which easily travel between cultures. We thus wanted to find out conditions for a readability of somatic movement across cultures. The live performance created should be understood as a model for the translation of experience, which at once illustrates our experience of translating the specific history of East Germany 1989/90, while in performance carrying out a case study on the translation of historical experience with the audience.

Translating experience from interview into performance

Conceptually speaking, to translate the women's experience conveyed in the interviews for performance purposes meant performing the multiple stages of mediation through which experience was filtered and reworked. The three main stages concerned the dialogic creation of experience in the interview; its subsequent scrutiny by the researcher for the development of the performance practice; and the final work with practitioners on the performance for an audience. As everyday experience was remembered in the interviews, it was shaped according to multiple social and personal parameters. Examples of these are social taboos which caused the interviewee to remain silent about certain aspects; the individual memory capacity that determines their historical perspective on the matter. This intentionality that is

part of any historical discourse is one of the reasons Carlo Ginzburg has pointed toward the ultimate aim of historiography as the acknowledgement of a legitimate concern with historical justice (2001: 60). It marks the historical discourse as both a performance of values and as a recurring process of negotiation that is profoundly shaped by its participants. This, again, is an important prerequisite for the applicability of performance as medium for translation.

What is translated across the ages and presented as history to us today forms a contemporary multimedia canon of historical documents and is heavily influenced by memory discourse. Acting as a gatekeeper to past experience, history alternately opens up, but also closes down our opportunities for envisioning the past collectively. In this project, we were concerned with the translation of the somatic experience that surfaced in the interviews, translating the somatic residues of everyday practice in 1989/90. The remains of the historical body of 1989/90 and the somatic traces of an everyday lived by ordinary people were at the heart of the exploration. Interviews with witnesses were conducted. This central strategy for oral history in the creation and handling of data in itself denotes a process of translation (Frisch, 1990). In addition, performance practice with a multicultural group of practitioners represented the vehicle to explore the framing of processes that count as historiography. In a studio environment, somatic translation took place. Performers translated the interview experience to themselves through movement and into space. This eventually led to an adaptation of interview material for performance, with performers approaching

interview statements. I analysed the interview scripts using NVIVO

(see Glossary, page 2) to select interview phenomena and pieces for the development of performance tasks for the workshops and studio sessions. The topics were linked to collective ghosts of Wende

remembrance and narratives made up of normative public statements, stereotypes, and specific historical images. This stage marked the turn from a conventional empirical analysis to live performance as a means to contextualise and interpret the interview data. In a next step, I translated specific interview phenomena into performative tasks. This step marked the transition from verbatim statement (or story) to performance score (or task). While the interviews were not translated into English, a first contextual analysis of specific crisis experience 1989/90 was translated into tasks for the performers. This phase also incorporated the selection of appropriate objects and props which aided the experiment and were mostly given by interviewees.

The subsequent stage of mediation saw interview experience translated into movement through improvisation. Here multiple creative languages were employed to generate associations. These were based on the abilities of the performers and included music, dance, physical theatre, and endurance art. The experimental process centred on a somatic approach to the interview material, to embody the related experience. This was done in a series of collective sessions, which established a collaborative process involving a group of performers with diverse cultural backgrounds. It is important to note that in an effort to aid the translation of the interview data, I provided the specificity and intelligibility of the everyday remembered; the

personal concept of a good story or reliable fact; and the efforts of a witness to display narrative consistency. In a second process of transformation, these accounts were analysed in order to distil tasks for the performance work. This process addressed the central questions of the research project; this filtered the interview material based on its ability to evidence phenomena related to somatic practice in everyday life and crisis experience. Subsequently, performers reacted to these tasks based on their own life experience and imagination. In so doing, they further shaped the translation process as well as the memory that was utilised, at once appropriating it to express their performative ideas for translation and preparing the material for an audience.

Going into further detail, the translation process from interviews to performance can be divided into eight distinct stages. First, I designed a questionnaire which provided the conceptual frame for the expression of experience in the interviews. In a second step, the interviews were executed, a dialogic endeavour influenced by all participants and retained its partial autonomy from the preconceived framework. Subsequently, the interviews were recorded and transcribed conventionally to capture the auditive reality of the interviews using the academic transcription software F4. I also drew up memos charting somatic aspects of the interview process. In a fourth step, a cross- examination of interview topics compared responses related to the various themes (hygiene, consumption, well-being).

I employed a hermeneutic approach in order to identify topics and ways of dealing with collective cultural associations within the

Translators: The multicultural group of performers

Transcribing aspects of the interview findings visually formed only one part of the research into a performative translation of body practice. Effort was also put into developing a model on how to think and envision this body of crisis cross-culturally, how to make it productive for dialogue that crosses the boundaries of age, gender and cultural specificity. This research approach necessitated a specific kind of performer. Central to the performance work was the notion that performers with a different cultural set of experiences can retrace, tease out, and visualise a crisis experience they have not had themselves in a tentative process of intersecting experiences and associations through dance and other forms of creative movement. Accordingly, the strategies for approaching interview experience in a studio environment emphasised embodiment and improvisation on the practitioners' account. I rejected verbatim-based performance giving form to the interview material. This was done in order to foreground the body in the exploration and production of memory processes as much as identify potential performance nodes or moments for translating crisis experience. Instead, non-verbal movement was regarded as beneficial for a transcultural translation of experience, because it presupposes and emphasises a common point of departure for its reading: the somatic. Human sameness is grounded in the basic double condition of having a body and 'being body', an idea first advanced by Helmuth Plessner (1981). The fact that all of us have a body creates a notion that understanding somebody else's somatic experience might be possible and encourages the hard work of translation in the first place. However, contextual explanations and an elaboration of interview pieces while

working with the performers on the tasks.

The assembly, selection and stylisation of the performative responses, developed in the workshops by the performers, followed. It further initiated a process of refinement, shaping and selecting the performative responses to devise the performance model. This was done jointly by the performers and me through an ongoing process of reflection on the material produced. In a last step, we collectively selected and arranged the pieces of performance work for the performance model. I was in charge of this process and took over the role of the director. A visual designer added to the model by assisting in the creation of the scenography for the performance. Although all performers contributed to this process, it was quintessentially my effort and decision-making which determined the final refinement of the performance model. Overall, my function within the translation process was to act as a facilitator on various levels. My involvement was crucial in the initial and final parts of the translation process, while I ceased to control the process entirely in working on the performative tasks. The final performance again followed Benjamin's theoretical thinking about the dissimilar characteristics of original and translation aforementioned, that is the necessary failure of the product of translation to completely resemble the original for effectiveness (Benjamin, 1972; Johnson, 2003). Accordingly, the creation of performance work illustrated translation as a multiple stage process that recognises the produced translation as closely associated and akin to the original source, however not necessarily resembling it.

material theatre to dance, ballet, physical theatre and performance art. Rather than pushing a common performance style, the distinct qualities of the creative languages practised by the performers were exploited. The performers were encouraged to integrate their own experiences, triggered by the specific East German example. Encouraged to contribute their own research interests, they framed the translational perspective of the studio work. They sifted through the performance material with an eye to a visualisation of the female body in performance, physical pain and loss of identity through migration, social travesty and understanding the social change from socialism to capitalism. The translation process heavily depended on the agency of its participants, and this aspect of the process is examined in more detail in Chapter Three.

The tasks posed stimulated the performers' creative, intellectual, and emotional capacities in different ways than translated transcripts of the interview material and a large amount of historical documents would have done. They contained insight from the interviews and involved everyday objects such as bottles, textiles, bags, deodorant, and apples. The performers were given thirty minutes to develop a movement sequence in response, drawing on their own personal artistic, physical and cultural vocabulary. After the showing of a piece, everybody responded to the material presented. The feedback included descriptions of what had been seen, questions as to what had been experienced or intended by the performer, connections to other pieces presented before, and practical suggestions to a further development of the piece. Each performer would then be given another the corporealities of humans are based on alterity and experienced

in radically differing ways. To work from the assumption that all of us are bodies that are culturally formed and utilised differently demands that we acknowledge and sustain diversity in the reading – that is, translation of experience. Amongst others, these cultures of the body are shaped by social parameters such as age, work and activities, tradition and consumptive patterns. Accordingly, employing somatic- based performance for a translation of somatic experience seemed exceptionally well suited to enact and visualise the ambivalent striving for difference in sameness that marks translation as a shifting and provisional act of relation. Live performance mirrors the fundamental character of any process of cultural translation, potentially shaping a situation that Homi Bhabha has coined 'a third space' in which the ambivalence and hybridity in creating meaning is played out (1994). Bhabha also describes translation as performance by characterising it "as the staging of cultural difference" (1994: 227). This suggests the suitability of translating somatic experience in movement-based performance. In our case, to arrive at an analysis from somatically thinking through the interview material meant radically embodying the research. It was achieved by sifting through the somatic experience in such as way as to reapply this experience directly onto the body of the performer.

The performance practice centred on creative processes within which the spoken word would be of second order, if not altogether absent. The performers finally involved in the core group were conversant with performance tools which ranged from physical and

acknowledging the limits in translating history across cultures and through live performance. Using movement and music, endurance art and video, the performance invoked some of the ghosts that haunt the public discourse on 1989/90, while commenting on the traceability and translatability of experience.

The performance model that developed within the project is based on a performance of sensory documents. Facilitating the creation of a relationship to the documents presented to the audience, it targets sensual, somatic imagination. The model seeks to translate cultures of the body within the frame of crisis experience on the basis of the interviews carried out. It is therefore primarily concerned with a visualisation of the quest for the traces of somatic experience, rather than the narration of conventional historical facts and events. Amongst other things, we experimented with the breakdown of narrative conventions (lapses and stretches in time), the insertion of non- narrative episodes and the deconstruction of evolving characters linked to individual performers. This was designed to heighten the spectators' conscious experience of the event as theatrical, documentary and fabricated at the same time. We thus were eager to draw the spectator in and out of recognition and identification in a shifting, self- and half- conscious individual and collective memory process. The parameters of this process were framed by a play on sensation and embodiment on the one hand, and an intellectual, documentary, and visual memory archive on the other. The final performance model thus represented a document of our work in the studio: how a group of performers from diverse cultural backgrounds practically engaged with the interview twenty minutes to use this feedback in order to further develop the

piece before showing it again. A three-minute video clip of a collective session can be found on the website, showing the development of the fossils sequence using non-verbal movement improvisation:

http://bodycrisis.org/collsession

To involve a multicultural group of practitioners in the project had the central aim of creating a performative space in which the East German example would meaningfully intersect with other cultural experiences to produce interculturally readable visual tableaux of everyday experience in crisis. To use a diverse cultural group was also important insofar, as their differing levels of exposure to the history of 1989/90 mirrored different German audiences and future generations. Triggered by the specific East German example, the performers worked on instances of crisis experience in a creative manner to eventually arrive at a fundamental somatic critique of dominant historiography and an artistic appreciation of the struggle for recognition of injustice, the roots of universal experiences of discrimination and failed hopes grounded in political crisis and change. Therefore, rather than telling another history of 1989, the final performance model established a pattern for a critical engagement with historical documents derived from the German example. While not giving up on translating the East German experience, we regarded it as necessary to critically engage with modes of translating – that is, writing and telling history – in order to avoid being considered naïve in our approach toward the subject. The performance model was designed at once to recognise the efforts, affects, and necessity of attempting translation again and again, while

knowing a specific course of events. Diverse stories can connect, overlap, and develop on these grounds. To rely on performance for cultural translation can be the key to access, with body and mind, the experiences of others as our own.

material for a somatic translation of crisis experience. In four sequences, spectators were able to witness our attempts at deciphering, modelling, and passing on the crisis experiences. In recognition of the difficulties that would most certainly be encountered in cultural translation, we explored the liminal, but creative field of recognition and interpretation of the East German case study.

In line with any memory generated in interviews, somatic experience is gathered on a personal level, but it is not solely individual. Somatic experience is created socially, based on socio-cultural standards (e.g. of hygiene) and political frames for actions (e.g. daily queuing for commuters to cross borders between Israeli and Palestinian territory or the socialist invention of the 'new human being'). We should not be scared by the fact that voiced experience, itself already a piece of dialogic translation, is changed and remodelled in performative translation, thus becoming something else or new. Invariably, in translation what is being translated is being transformed in the process. That is, certain