Editor’s Note: Fall 2016

As a Fulbright Fellow, I am spending four months in Vienna at an interdisciplinary research institute for Cultural Studies. We are eighteen fellows, trained in such fields as Anthropology; Political Science; History; Asian and Media Studies; Italian, Slavic, and Middle Eastern Languages; Comparative Literature; Philosophy; Music; and Theatre. Our diverse research topics connect through a common theme: “Cultures of Translation.” German is the birth language for about half of our group. As a non-native speaker of German, I spend each day approximating linguistic expressions from German to English, while adjusting my understanding of foreign cultural cues, especially given the differences between Germany and Austria in language and behavior. “Translation is a form,” Walter Benjamin reminds us in his essay, “The Task of the Translator” (1923).¹ Significantly, he adds that in order to understand translation as more than simply moving from one form or mode of language to another, we must return to the original to comprehend its translatability. This suggests that something new arises during translation: language, style, context, and interpretation all convey subtle cultural markers. What role does the translator assume in adapting a literary or dramatic form across historical time and/or geographic space? To what extent do we “receivers” alter our contemporary interpretative perception of an artwork to envisage its transformation in a different cultural setting? In the seven essays featured here, the authors translate culture to renew questions largely related to ancient and early modern dramaturgy, while considering contemporary theatre practice and performance. At the same time, the authors nudge their scholarly inquiries toward other disciplines, traversing boundaries of space and time. Thus Lauren Coker positions her study of dramaturgical space in plays by Beaumont and Jonson, using disability studies to show the representation of feigned illness in seventeenth-century comedy. Ian Faith looks to disease and madness in Shakespeare to examine the performance of madness in the 2012 NTS production of Macbeth. Jeff Kaplan’s interest in the performative body centers on Plato’s ancient dialogue of Ion, suggesting its contribution to acting theory. Zornitsa Dimitrova also looks to the Greeks: using Aristotle’s ideas on mimesis, she proposes a theory of potentiality that includes postdramatic theatre forms. Introducing the theoretical work of René Girard, Matthew Yde explores how ancient tropes of representation, specifically sacrifice, reappear in the contemporary drama of Martin McDonagh. Regardless of genre, adaptation necessitates a process of translation. Kevin Calcamp engages a transcultural reading of the ancient myth of Hippolytus, drawing on Michel Foucault’s history of sexuality to elucidate dramatic variations of Euripides’ fifth-century tragedy. The essays thus expand a focus that goes beyond linguistic translation to include intercultural histories of society.

How can we render intelligible a system of codes or dramaturgical structures with performative potential? In our final essay, Julia Walker and Glenn Odom offer a new mode for scholarly reinterpretation and reform. They ask that we adopt a global scope and comparative method with which to examine plays and performances across cultures, geographies, and disciplines. In their call for a new kind of scholarship, they propose a subdiscipline, “Comparative Modern Performance Studies.” It is not enough, they contend, for theatre and performance scholars to create studies that join broad areas of time and place. Rather, the authors challenge us also to engage in scholarship that incorporates what they term a “vertical vector.” This would allow for comparative work in theatre/performance studies to intersect perpendicularly, as well as horizontally, thus encompassing cultural forms with varying degrees of self-reflexivity amid the shifting movement between art and life. I invite you to consider the authors’ proposal and send us your submissions for future issues of JDTC.

As I compile this Fall issue on my sabbatical abroad, I extend my gratitude to those who have assisted with managing the journal behind the scenes. To our incoming Managing Editor, Kathryn Nygren, welcome! Kate is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. Her dissertation research explores contemporary Black drama and its engagement with the methodologies of transnational feminisms. She argues that this work makes use of the framework...