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Vanessa Montesi | Dance as Intermedial Translation
28th August, 2024 in Author’s corner
Vanessa Montesi is a HE Lecturer in Dance Studies at Dance City/University of Sunderland, a member of the Centre for Comparative Studies (University of Lisbon), and a trustee at Company of Others.
The field of intermedial translation is just at its infancy and already promises to become one of the main tenets of the discipline.
Vanessa Montesi’s book Dance as Intermedial Translation 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. “Conceptualising translation through the lens of theatrical dance allows me to see the translation process as a creative, corporeal, and political practice of negotiating human and non-human agencies.”, explains Montesi.
Briefly and concisely explain in plain language what the book is about.
This book departs from dance practice and performances to question strongly held assumptions about the notion of “language”, “text” and “translation” in the field of Translation Studies. At a time when the translator risks being made redundant by the expanding technological landscape, the book interrogates the meaningful import of body and materiality in the translation process, a focal point of recent literature in Translation Studies.After introducing the intermedial framework that supports my analysis and discussing theoretical issues of creativity, ephemerality, and embodiment, I focus on 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 me 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, and to chart a course for the development of dance translation as a legitimate, if still under-researched, subfield of translation studies.
What or who inspired you to choose this topic?
The inspiration for this book came from my desire, as an M.A. student of Translation Studies, to learn more about dance works that were based on literature and how to analyse them. As part of my degree I was able to take a module on “Film Adaptation of Literary Classics”. I remember going to see a dance performance based on the novel 1984 performed by the Northern Ballet and thinking: “if I can study how literature is transposed into film, why can’t I do the same with dance?” This motivated me to start researching this subject, and I found such scarcity of literature on the topic that I decided to make it the focus of my research, so that other people passionate about both dance and language could study it in the future. I felt that outside of dance studies, dance remained an underrepresented and undervalued field of knowledge, and that it was important to carve out a space for it in interdisciplinary thinking and in its relation to other fields – which is why I decided to position my research within Translation Studies rather than Dance Studies. This was in 2015, and this subfield of research has developed significantly since, with more and more exciting texts looking at the ongoing dialogue between translation and dance. My hope is that my book, alongside these other texts, will help to establish Dance Translation as a legitimate field of research.
Do you have any reading suggestions to share (books, blogs, journals, …) for anyone who wants to know more about the subject?
As I mentioned earlier, research on this topic has become more prolific in recent years, and some very interesting articles and books have appeared that have inspired and informed my writing. The very first seed for this book was Karen Bennett’s article Words into Movement: the Ballet as Intersemiotic Translation. She’s also an editor of the Journal Translation Matters, which has published a special issue on multimodality and intersemiotic translation and more recently one on inter-epistemic translation and experiential translation (for those interested in the broadest sense). Other collections dealing with intermedial translation include the JosTrans special issue Translation and Plurisemiotic Practices, edited by Francis Mus and Sarah Neelsen, and the forthcoming volume Translation in the Performing Arts, edited by Enza de Francisci and Cristina Marinetti. There are also a number of fascinating books to mention: Dance, Modernism and Modernity by Ramsay Burt (2020), Jess McCormack ‘s book Choreography and Verbatim Theatre (2018), Helen Julia Minors’ edited book Music, Text and Translation (2013) and her monograph Music, Dance and Translation (2023), and Campbell and Vidal’s The Experience of Translation (2024) and The Translation of Experience: Cultural Artefacts in Experiential Translation (2025). The latter’s focus on the senses and embodied experience in translation echoes Ivancic’s conception of the process and experience of translating in Il Manuale del Traduttore (2016).
How did the writing process for this book go? Did you experience anything surprising, amusing or strange?
The writing process of this book was immensely inflected by personal and world events. As a PhD student at the university of Lisbon, I was part of a community of students focusing on extremely different issues, which influenced my thinking from the very start. My peers’ projects, so different from mine, raised questions about my research: how could I write a text that was feminist and decolonial while talking about something that seemed (but was not necessarily) more interested in aesthetic issues than than political ones? I believe that everything is worth researching, not only when it obviously relates to cultural and political debates; I also believe that an author’s positionality and political beliefs should shine through their research and the way they conduct it, as there is no such thing as neutrality. So this was one of the questions raised by my colleagues’ works, which might not have been raised if I had worked in solitude or with different colleagues. The second way in which this work was inflected by outside event was the Covid19 pandemic. I had literally just moved to Canada to carry out fieldwork with Choinard’s dance company when the first lockdown was introduced. This meant that I had to change my plan completely, replacing studio visits and observing rehearsals with online and in-person interview with dancers and composers, which in turn raised new questions that might not have arisen had I not talked to them. As for the writing itself, it also happened during the lockdown, and in different places, as my British partner and I tried to stay together despite Schengen restrictions and national lockdowns, which strangely meant we had to be on the move. Giving myself a structure where I would go for an early morning walk, do the writing, and then practice yoga in the evening was incredibly important in terms of setting thinking in motion and taking care of myself at a time of uncertainty and isolation.
What would you like readers to remember about your book?
That translators are creative, embodied actors who actively operate in the world and therefore engage with it politically, as they make choices that carry consequences. That dance should be approached as a legitimate medium and example within other disciplines just as we do with cinema, photography, visual art, music, video games, etc. And that the field of intermedial translation is still in its infancy and already promises to become one of the main tenets of the discipline, as translators experiment, and theory accommodates and promotes these experiments.
Do you have any plans yet for another publication? What will it be about?
Since writing this book, I have moved to the UK on a spouse visa, which was probably the most challenging thing I have done in my life. The application is extremely expensive and involves being separated from your partner for an indefinite and long period of time, while not being able to work and plan your future. For many, it is not even ever a possibility, as the British spouse needs to prove that they earn over £29,000 a year, effectively pricing out of love for 50% of the British population. This experience made me think about how the right to a private and family life is more and more turned into a commodity by increasingly harsh immigration policies in the UK and elsewhere, and prompted me to think about how artists have responded to this. What are the artistic representations of this issue, which in 2023 alone affected over 88,000 people? How are writers, choreographers, film and theatre directors responding to this? How are they challenging and complicating the popular and media treatment of this issue? These are the questions I have been thinking about and which I would love to develop in a new book that explores artistic representations of the impact of the hostile environment on transnational couples and families and how does this indirectly impacts other sectors of the population.
