In a series of surreal comedic encounters, a French actress is fired for her bad behaviour, two tourists find themselves disappointed by the city of Paris and a French translator attempts to navigate the complex relationship with her mother and her mother tongue. Such is the scope of Nicola Gunn’s new work, APOLOGIA.
Gunn, who has always been interested in language and themes of translation and interpretation, fuses comedy with awkward attempts to express ourselves and communicate across boundaries.
“I grew up in several non-English speaking countries before moving to Australia when I was 10, and so from a young age I was aware that there were entire realities I did not have access to because I did not speak the language,” says Gunn. “When I was a teenager, I picked up 3 different translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and much to my amazement I discovered they were not the same. This is when I really started to understand the subjectivities involved in translation and interpretation and the fact that there is no such thing as a word for word correlation between languages.”
In creating the work, Gunn, who is writer, director and performer, has done a huge amount of research into translation and interpretation, reading literature on the subject as well as working directly with professional translators and interpreters. “The first thing I was told that has always stayed with me is that language is unstable. After all, it was something we just invented.”
Research and a project that has spanned many years, Gunn says this is the second instalment in a planned trilogy of works dealing with the subject. Her in-depth study involves a variety of themes including: the dramaturgy of translation- how does translation work, how do we create meaning, how can we transpose a thought or idea from one language into another and how to make this process visible; the vagaries and subjectivity of interpretation; our relationship to our mother tongue and subsequently, our relationship to our mother, how language shapes us, and/or shapes our reality; and how does language feel and how can it make us feel.
APOLOGIA encompasses ambisonic sound, theatre installation, film, and literature.
“Sound plays a significant part in the project and I’ve been working a lot with pre-recorded voices (primarily that of the French translator Séverine Magois) and so assembling the audio and working with spatialised sound has perhaps been the most challenging,” she says. “I also have 100s of hours of recorded conversations with Séverine over several years, so I have an over-abundance of material and making choices (which is the translator’s dilemma) has been very difficult!”
Gunn’s s works combine theatre, choreography and visual art to explore the fragility of the human condition. Her previous works include Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster, Working With Children, In Spite of Myself and Hello My Name Is, which have been performed in Australia as well as all across Europe and the Americas.
Gunn says she tends to make work about whatever interests her or whatever she is going through at the time. Often these are one and the same. So, her work is very personal on the one hand, and universal on the other. Also, she acknowledges that her relationship with translator Magois is particularly special and that that comes through in the work.
For Gunn, making a new performance work is about problem-solving, but first inventing the problem to be solved. “I like the development process of working through ideas with a team of collaborators. It’s an immense privilege to be working with such a group of brilliant minds: Emma Valente, Kate Davis, Martyn Coutts, Darius Kedros, Katie Åtland, Yumi Umiumare, Taka Takiguchi, Séverine Magois, Aoi Matsushima and many other people who have advised along the way.”
Gunn hopes audiences will consider their own relationship to language and share her belief that translation and the reality of living between multiple cultures is a fascinating topic.
Gunn says of her work: “Expect a convergence of different realities, presented with humour and experimentation. The premise is pretty stupid and fantastical: I want to be a French actress. I take this idea and all the mythologies and tropes of french-ness and expose it for the absurdity it is.”
APOLOGIA unpacks Nicola Gunn’s personal fantasy of being a French actress – despite being categorically not French.
August 6 -18
malthousetheatre.com.au
