Translation and Translanguaging in Production and Performance in Community Arts

Translation and Translanguaging in Production and Performance in Community Arts Jessica Mary Bradley Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Education September 2018 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own work and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. ii iii This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Jessica Mary Bradley to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by Jessica Mary Bradley in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. 2018 University of Leeds iv v For Emilia, Isabelle and Tim vi vii Acknowledgements It is almost impossible to do justice to those who have contributed in many ways to this thesis. To start with, I want to thank Bev Adams and Faceless Arts for their generosity in allowing me to follow where they led. I am grateful for their collaboration and ongoing friendship. This thesis is dedicated to the legacy of their work which goes from strength to strength. Likewise, I owe gratitude to Tea Vidmar, Špela Koren and Goro Osojnik at the Ana Monro Theatre who allowed me entry into their world, again with great generosity of spirit. Thank you to ‘Team Zlatorog’, and to all those involved with the production and performance of ‘How Much Is Enough?’. My deepest thanks go to my supervisors James Simpson and Mike Baynham. This thesis would not have been possible without their guidance and incredible kindness with their time. I would like to thank my examiners, Kate Pahl and Maggie Kubanyiova, for reading this thesis and for their critical and supportive comments. Over the course of my research I have been aware of how fortunate I was to be part of the TLANG research project. Thank you to Angela Creese for creating the project and for her thoughtful and gentle project management and ongoing support and encouragement. I would also like to thank the rest of the TLANG team, and especially Jolana Hanusova and John Callaghan. Over the past four years I have been privileged to meet and work with inspiring colleagues whom I am now able to call friends. Thank you to Louise Atkinson, Lou Harvey, Sam McKay, Emilee Moore, Sari Pöyhönen and Piotr Węgorowski. It takes a village to write a thesis. I could not have done this without the support of my mum and dad and my mother and father in law. Thank you also to my siblings, Joe, Lizzie and Rosie. And finally, much love to Emilia, Isabelle and Tim, to whom I owe a huge debt. To Emilia, I wrote your name first because I know it’s not fair that the youngest sibling’s name always seems to go last and I appreciate your strong sense of justice. This PhD has been a major part of your life - you were eighteen months old when I embarked on this and now you are six. To Isabelle, the aspiring author, this is to show you that if I can write a book, so can you. viii Lake Bohinj, August 2016 ix Abstract This thesis is an ethnographic investigation of the processes involved in producing a collaborative piece of street arts theatre. It addresses a current shift in theories of dynamic multilingualism, specifically translanguaging, towards the multimodal and the embodied. It asks how people make meaning across languages, cultures and practices. It also asks how people make meaning and perform meaning across spaces and places, about the resources they have and use, and how these resources are drawn on in multiple ways to make and perform meaning. By taking the theatre of the street as its central concern, this research informs current understandings of multilingual and multimodal communication in arts-based settings. The findings extend theoretical understandings of translanguaging and further develop empirically grounded knowledge about how people communicate when developing a shared project. A range of research approaches was adopted for this study, including linguistic ethnography, visual ethnography and sensory ethnography. The research focuses on the trans- semiotisation of a story – a thread - as it undergoes a series of transformations during the production process to become, in its final incarnation, a performance in the street. In focusing on collaborative street arts, it raises theoretical questions around the extent to which the concept of translanguaging can encompass the multimodal and the embodied. It also addresses a need for innovative approaches to understanding communication in transdisciplinary projects. Its findings are relevant across disciplines and sectors, including for cross-sector arts-based project settings, for street arts practitioners, and for arts- informed pedagogy and community arts. Methodologically, this study illustrates and evidences the centrality of ethnography as an approach to understanding communication across spaces and places. In particular, it highlights the role of short, intensive periods of ethnographic study within the context of a wider commitment to collaborative working and the insights made possible through this way of working. x Academic publications arising from this thesis A full list of academic publications arising from this research is included in Appendix G, alongside a list of conference presentations and invited speaking events. Key publications, sole and jointly authored, which relate directly to the findings from this research, were bound and submitted in a separate document. xi Table of contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................... vii Abstract ............................................................................................................. ix Academic publications arising from this thesis ................................................... x Table of contents ................................................................................................ xi List of illustrations .......................................................................................... xxiv Part I: Conceptualisation ..................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................. 2 1.1. Prologue ........................................................................................................................... 3 1.2. On ‘speaking’ and ‘not speaking’ ............................................................................. 3 1.3. On ‘translanguaging’ .................................................................................................... 4 1.4. The speaking of slices of stories .............................................................................. 5 1.5. Speaking of texts ........................................................................................................... 6 1.6. Speaking of ethnography ........................................................................................... 6 1.7. On ‘speaking’ for others.............................................................................................. 7 1.8. Speaking of participant observation ..................................................................... 8 1.9. On ‘speaking the language’ ........................................................................................ 8 1.10. Thesis structure ........................................................................................................ 9 1.11. Summary ...................................................................................................................... 9 xii Chapter Two: Theoretical underpinnings .......................................................... 10 2.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 11 2.2. Dynamic multilingualism and translanguaging .............................................. 12 2.2.1. Language and symbolic power ................................................................................. 12 2.2.2. Introducing translanguaging ..................................................................................... 14 2.2.3. An historical perspective on dynamic multilingualism .................................. 16 2.2.4. Third space: the idiolect and distributed language .......................................... 17 2.2.5. Alternative approaches to dynamic multilingualism....................................... 18 2.3. Clarifying translanguaging as underpinning the current research ......... 22 2.4. Multimodality .............................................................................................................. 25 2.5. Resemiotisation .......................................................................................................... 30 2.6. Translanguaging spaces, spatial repertoires and semiotic assemblages31 2.7. Embodiment: the case for puppetry .................................................................... 33 2.8. Inter to intra-action.................................................................................................. 35 2.9. Research questions ................................................................................................... 37 2.10. Summary ................................................................................................................... 39 Chapter

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