Translating Cultures (PDF)

Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 The Royal Court’s International Department: Transformative Processes, Impacts & Legacies An interim report funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Translating Cultures) August 2012 Elaine Aston and Mark O’Thomas This report is an outcome of the AHRC-funded Project, 'Creating Cultural Exchange and Change', conceived in response to the 'Translating Cultures' developmental call and focused on the work of the International Department of the Royal Court Theatre, England’s premier venue for new playwriting. Our Project aim was to enquire after and report on the process that underpins the Court’s commitment to supporting and developing playwriting internationally, looking to the challenges and risks this entails as well as the transformative possibilities, impacts and legacies that might arise for those involved in this method of cultural and creative exchange. Our findings draw on international meetings held in Brazil, Chile and Morocco (June-July 20012), and on a ‘Translating Cultures’ seminar hosted at the Royal Court (June 2012) Report Contents 1.The Royal Court International Department in Context 2. Finding Partners: the Role of the British Council 3. Residencies, the Developmental Workshop and Growing Creative Industries 4. The Role of the Translator 5. Guiding Principles & the Creative Process 6. The Challenge of Form 7. Impact on British Writers, Critics and Audiences 8. International Legacies 2 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 1.The Royal Court International Department in Context To contextualise: The Royal Court established its International Department in 1996, appointing Elyse Dodgson as Director. However, those involved in the theatre date its international vision back to 1956: to the arrival of the English Stage Company into the Sloane Square premises (London) that the Court continues to occupy today. Back in the mid-1950’s, Artistic Director George Devine’s mission was for a subsidised theatre as an alternative to the commercial mainstream, one primarily committed to developing new drama. His vision was both national and international: of wanting to nurture and develop a new generation of English dramatists and also to pursue a line of European work. In other words, for Devine international was rather narrowly conceived as Western Europe, with Beckett and Brecht as seminal attractions and major influences. By the late eighties, the moment when the Royal Court began running the first of its international workshops, initially as an income generator for the theatre, its international horizon extended beyond Europe, although even so writers came mainly from the English-speaking continents of Australia and North America. As Dodgson, explains, international ‘meant the United States because at that time we were not more adventurous than that’.1 It was only with the appointment of Stephen Daldry as the new Artistic Director in the early nineties that the full potential of operating in the international realm was realised and Dodgson was given the green light to develop the work and go global. Daldry was determined on shifting international work to ‘the heart of the theatre’. This he claims is ‘because there is an energy there that generates new work around the world’.2 Staging an increasing number of international works he sought to capitalise on that ‘energy’ by formally establishing the theatre’s International Department’ in 1996, positing in retrospect ‘the international policy [as] the greatest single achievement of the Royal Court [from the mid- 1990s to the mid-2000s], as much as getting all the young playwrights to write plays’.3 Ian Rickson, Daldry’s successor in 1998, and Dominic Cooke, who followed Rickson in 2007, both kept faith with the ‘international policy’ that Daldry had reinvigorated and revitalised. For Rickson, the historical resonances and legacies of Devine’s ‘mission’ were those he deemed important to a contemporary vision of a theatre invested in cultural values that ‘embrace risk and are international’.4 And Cooke, who, prior to his directorship at the Court had worked in collaboration with Dodgson, began his term of office with the view that he would make ‘more airspace for [international] work to land on [the Court’s] stage’.5 These three successive directorial regimes at the Court have, albeit under different theatre conditions (such as changing personnel, refurbishment programmes, or funding changes), consolidated and more thoroughly realised the aspiration to be a truly international theatre. At the same time this move on the part of the theatre to internationalise needs to be set against the larger picture of globalization. As Patrick Lonergan argues in his lucid and insightful account of Theatre and Globalization, ‘[i]t is generally agreed ... that the current period of economic globalization began with the collapse of communism in Europe in the early 1990s’.6 Lonergan wrestles critically with the definitions or more precisely lack of a clear definition of globalization and with its principle discourses of global capitalism, social criticism, the nation state, global culture and ecology.7 Resisting the impulse to dismiss globalization in reductive terms as quite simply a ‘bad thing’, instead he urges critical (in both senses) considerations of how ‘dramatists producers, audiences and performers can choose to act’ within this phenomenon seen as ‘a process to which we contribute’.8 How the Court ‘choose[s] to act’ as it goes global is a crucial matter: how its cultural capital as England’s major new writing venue, as the writers’ theatre of a British theatrical paradigm that privileges the playwright over the director, writing over performance, becomes 3 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 a brand export. As Lonergan observes, global branding ‘involves a relocation of power from a physical to a conceptual space, or a deterritorialization of power’.9 In the Court’s case, its new-writing ‘brand’ is no longer limited to its physical premises in Sloane Square, but goes global through its international theatre networking.10 A major risk here, however, is what we might term a reterritorialization of power, a symbolic claiming of new writing territories in the theatre’s own imperialist image, as it were. In order to minimalise this kind of risk, much depends on approach and process, which in turn have a bearing on the transformative impact and legacies for theatre cultures, locally and globally. 2.Finding Partners: the Role of the British Council At the outset of our AHRC project, we sought to enhance our understanding of what the Royal Court does when it wants to work in another country, with artists of that country, to develop their work further. How are partners and projects identified? While we gained insights into how various links have been established through informal and formal networks over extended periods of time, overall, it became clear to us that the British Council has a key role to play in terms of the Royal Court’s ability to form meaningful partnerships with theatre practitioners in new territories. The theatre’s relationship with the British Council, along with support from the Genesis Foundation,11 emerged as central to the development (and funding) of the theatre’s international initiatives. On reflection, this is not surprising given how the Court’s international ‘mission’ readily dovetails with that of the Council’s commitment ‘to build mutually beneficial relationships between people in the UK and other countries and to increase appreciation of the UK’s creative ideas and achievements’.12 In helping foster these relations the British Council intends to promote the ‘engagement and trust between people of different cultures through the exchange of knowledge and ideas’.13 Mirroring the idea of cultural understanding arrived at through ‘the exchange of knowledge and ideas’ is the Court’s process and practice of nurturing, developing and exchanging cultures of playwriting. 3. Residencies, the Developmental Workshop and Growing Creative Industries Working often with the support of the British Council, Dodgson is positioned to identify potential partner countries and projects. Alongside of the international sourcing of projects, however, the Court also hosts annual, four-week ‘International Residencies’ at the theatre’s Sloane Square, London base. The residential programme for international playwrights dates back to the summer of 1993, when the Court hosted its first truly international residency with writers and directors coming from twelve different countries. By 2003, the scope of the residency became restricted to just writers and while its form has continued to evolve over the past fifteen years, it remains a kind of summer training camp for new writers from around the world to explore their own work in translation with and in response to a range of British theatre practitioners. The residences take the form of a developmental, workshopping process. The idea of workshopping as a means to both initiating and developing plays for the stage has now become the standard practice of new-writing theatres across the UK. While established playwrights tend to work via commission and are generally entrusted to deliver a play in a performable condition subject to minor rewrites, first-time or novice writers are unlikely to see a play produced unless it has undergone a development process in conjunction with a new writing venue such as The Bush Theatre, Soho Theatre, or indeed The Royal Court Theatre itself. The emergence of this model is one that has mirrored the notion of ‘development’ within the screenwriting realm, too, and clearly situates the writing process within an industry 4 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 that seeks to benefit from an early investment in talent that might grow into something of real aesthetic and financial value. 4. The Role of the Translator Unlike other major theatres such the National Theatre in London, or The Traverse, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Court does not commission English versions of a writer’s play.

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