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beverley curran Dry Lips Moves to Tokyo: Does Indigenous Drama Translate? In Lost in Translation (2003), middle-aged Hollywood star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) sits in a bar of a luxury hotel in Tokyo and wryly explains to Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) his reason for being there: “[I’m] getting paid two million dollars to endorse a whiskey ad when I could be doing a play somewhere.”Travelling itself can be a version of improvised theatre, but Bob’s and Charlotte’s Anglophone angst confines them mainly to the hotel where they express impatience and amusement at how poorly English is spoken by the Japanese who accommodate their American monolingualism. In this chapter, I would like to consider a much bolder foray into Tokyo and translation by looking at a Native Canadian play staged in Japanese by Japanese actors, namely the Rakutendan 2001 production of Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.1 The production is provocative because contemporary performances in Canada or Australia, for example, acknowledge the sensitive issue of cultural appropriation by casting Native actors to play Native roles. As Aboriginal director Wesley Enoch has explained,“[i]n indigenous productions, the politics of the play are written on the body.”2 If the bodies on stage erase that somatic representation of the political, then a consideration of Dry Lips in Tokyo is an opportunity to examine more carefully what gets lost in translation and what can be learned. For the Rakutendan production of Dry Lips, Highway was in consultation with director Wada Yoshio3 and applauded the decision to stage his drama in Japanese using Japanese actors. In fact, Highway has expressed frustration about the essentialist parameters within which the perception and the 323 17_cheadle_curran.qxd 2007/06/21 13:32 PM Page 323 production of his plays have been obliged to operate:“I don’t see the racial difference between actors as long as they’re generous of spirit and skilled … Any time you say that only native actors have the right to play native roles, you put a nail in the coffin of another native playwright” (qtd. in Bush 49). Certainly , Highway, like other indigenous playwrights, has used drama as a way to get stories told and political discussion started. In staging these cultural histories in Japan, there is the potential to extend the discussion to include Japan’s own indigenous populations. Thus the performances in Japanese by Japanese actors not only show the “processes of negotiation” between artists of different cultures, but also point “to the creative capacity of such interactions to be developed within Japan’s cultural space” (Eckersall 2). This paper will look specifically at the Japanese translation and performance of Highway ’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and consider the wider implications of such dramatic translations of indigenous works. Dry Lips Moves to Tokyo Dry Lips is the first play written by a First Nations playwright from Canada to be staged in Japan,4 one of three plays5 featured in the 2001 Canadian Contemporary Drama Festival sponsored by the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. I begin my consideration of the play’s translation and performance by looking at the promotional handbill for the Rakutendan production to see how Highway’s play was introduced to the Japanese public. The handbill for Dry Lips prominently displays the title of the play in both Japanese and English. The published play’s epigraph by Cree elder Lyle Longclaws also appears in Japanese: “before the healing can take place, the poison must first be exposed.” The background of the handbill is a colourful but blurred representation of a Native wearing the familiar Plains Indian war bonnet , an image found in a photograph of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill or George Catlin’s 1832 portrait of Four Bears, which has become an icon through replication “thousands of times, from the old travelling Wild West shows to Hollywood movies like Dances with Wolves”(Rios). It is a blurred depiction of an “American Indian,” then, that is used to visually promote Highway’s play to Japanese audiences. The illustration also provides the historical context used to locate Highway’s play. As the back of the handbill explains, The setting is a Canadian Indian reserve in 1990, the year Dances with Wolves opened in theatres, and 100 years after the first incident at Wounded Knee. With alcohol and Christianity brought from Europe, the Native people are losing their unique way of life, religion, and language. With the spirit of 324 Transitive...

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