Last night we gave a talk about R&R to a group of Yokohama artists at the project space where we have been staying. There was some good discussion around the relevance of the rules to the audience, and the concept of a “pure audience”.
We’re now only a few days away from the performances and things are speeding up… In addition to preparing their pieces, the artists are all grappling with the thorny issue of translation. What is the best way to convey the meaning of any spoken English to a majority Japanese-speaking audience? Surtitles? Live translation? A script in Japanese as a programme insert? Even Kiguchi, our native-Japanese-speaking artist, has long English passages in his piece. There has also been a great deal of discussion around the cultural implications of some of the elements in the various pieces. Flipping a coin, for example, is loaded with very different meanings in Japan than in England…
– Seth Kriebel
