Dance as Intermedial Translation

This book is situated in the breach opened up by recent debates on inherited notions of text, language, and translation that followed the emergence of new technologies. It examines two works of contemporary dance, Marie Chouinard’s Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des Délices (2016) and Mathieu Geffré’s Froth on the Daydream (2018), as examples of intermedial translation. Conceptualising translation through the lens of theatrical dance allows us to see the translation process as a creative, corporeal, and political practice of negotiating human and non-human agencies, deeply intertwined with issues of memory and struggles over representation. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical debates from translation theory, dance studies, cultural theory, gender studies, postcolonialism, art history, cognitive linguistics, multimodality, film studies, and memory studies, as well as on concrete examples of performative works, the book charts a course for the development of dance translation as a legitimate, if still under-researched, subfield of translation studies.