Chapter 4 continues the previous chapter’s translational approach to the performing body, exploring the potential and limitations of what Walter Mignolo terms the “decolonial gesture” through three award-winning Argentinian productions. Building upon contemporary theories of coloniality, the chapter examines the performers’ and their audience’s linked participation as site for considering how the translational might effectively engage onstage with the “other.” In Timbre 4’s Dínamo (Dynamo), the decolonial gesture is initiated in a performer’s own dramaturgy of nontranslation, which not only impedes linguistic communication but also triggers audience critical self-awareness. In Guillermo Cacace’s production of Mi hijo sólo camina un poco más lento (My Son Only Walks a Bit Slower), a Spanish-language production of a Croatian play, the decolonial gesture resides in the director’s translational reconfiguration of actor-spectator empathy and seemingly contradictory approaches to casting disability. In the chapter’s final case, Sudado (Sweaty/Stew), a collectively devised production, decolonial gesturality is complicated at multiple translational levels through the translocation of the Peruvian immigrant to the Buenos Aires stage. The chapter argues that theatre can offer opportunities for decolonization, but only if they emerge from within theatre’s assembled collective, which translationally determines the creation, construction, communication, and reception of the decolonial gesture.

Contemporary Performance Translation concludes on a practical, forward-thinking note about how we engage pedagogically and artistically with translation. To demonstrate how a theory of translationality might function within the rehearsal space and the academic classroom, the author describes her commitment to what Delia Poey calls “coyote-scholarship,” whereby scholars must “accept a certain degree of responsibility in how and to what ends we transport texts across borders and boundaries.” Reflections are offered regarding challenges faced when teaching Latin American theatre and performance to English-speaking students, and strategies are recounted for pedagogical and curricular approaches. The rehearsal room, too, is what Kate Eaton calls a translational laboratory. The book concludes with a return to the author’s experience of translating what Ricardo Monti calls his “broader realism” for and with US-trained actors and supports the currently circulating proposition that translations should be thought of as “new plays.” Such an approach is collaboratively driven but also operates on multiple translational levels, “in-between” language, culture, actor training, and directorial casting and approach. Translationality encompasses much more than the translator’s participation; it captures the vital collaborative process of artistic creation across and within cultures, languages, and performance practices.

Chapter 1 develops the book’s theoretical frame as well as provides initial experiential examples. In the author’s practice, theatrical translationality has inspired reconsiderations of actor-training practices, rehearsal processes, and artist-audience expectations, and it has modified her approaches to translation and direction. To illustrate, the chapter first turns to the author’s decades-long working relationship with Argentinian dramatist Ricardo Monti and the collaborative process in translating and publishing ten of his lyrical and imagery-rich texts into English, and her experience in directing the English-language translation of his play Visit with US actors. The chapter then shifts to a scholarly perspective to apply a theory of translationality to the radical revisionary processes at work in Argentinian playwright-director Daniel Veronese’s “Chekhov Project,” a multi-production endeavor that involved not only his versions of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya but also an original play, Mujeres soñaron caballos (Women Dreamt Horses). The chapter concludes with the author’s reflections on translating Veronese’s original play for a New York theatre festival, interpreting its success as largely the result of a translational collaboration between text, author, translator, director, cast, and producer. A theory of translationality accommodates and encourages these interlinked theatrical and performance elements, experiences, and participants.

The book’s final chapters engage with the actor (and spectator) as translational agent and site. Chapter 3 considers performances by what playwright-dramaturg Kaite O’Reilly calls the atypical actor, focusing on how current conversations in disability and Deaf studies and in theatre, dance, and performance translation studies might mutually illuminate. To illustrate, the chapter examines first the author’s performance work with deaf performance artist Terry Galloway and the Mickee Faust Club and its “ethic of accommodation,” counterposing an ethic of translationality that avoids accommodation’s asymmetric power dynamic. Next considered are O’Reilly’s plays and dramaturgical practices, where translationality can be seen operating between individuals, institutions, and cultures and highlighting the artistic potential for incorporating into performance frequently sidelined access devices. The chapter continues, adopting a translational approach to actor training and casting before concluding with self-translation as perhaps an even more effective disruptor of the prevailing disability-as-theatrical-metaphor, returning first to Galloway and the author’s participation in the Disability and Deaf Arts festival production of The Ugly Girl before closing with reflections upon watching disability rights activist and well-known British actor Liz Carr perform in Assisted Suicide: The Musical, a master-class in self-translation.