Invisible Indigeneity: First Nations and Aboriginal Theatre in Japanese Translation and Performance

Abstract

This paper will investigate the politics of theatre translation and translation theatre at work in the recent Rakutendan productions of The Rez Sisters and Up the Ladder, in order to suggest how indigenous theatre travels and is transformed by different bodies, languages, and audiences. The essay begins with a brief historical overview of the myth of Japan’s racial/cultural homogeneity and the particular issue of visibility in somatic and semantic terms. It then focuses on the two productions and considers telling aspects of their textual translations, as well as the ways in which they negotiated the fine line between translation theatre performance and cultural appropriation.

Introduction

"Translators are angels," begins a poem by John Mateer, "perfect nobodies: nameless/voiceless, winged incandescence, except when we're bad."¹ This describes a popular albeit problematic notion of the invisible role of the translator/interpreter, who assumes a faithful or neutral posture in his or her linguistic mediation. But can it ever be applied to a theatre translator whose linguistic mediation is meant to be embodied and performed? The Japanese term yakusha aurally conflates the roles of translator and actor, and Emori Tooru, who translated Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus, has described the process of theatre translation as one that "makes its passage through the body."² Emori refers specifically to the attention paid by the translator to the sounds of the original text, its rhythms and tempo that will be expressed onstage through the actor's voice and body. The suggestion that theatre translation must take into account the fictional orality of a dramatic text right down to its vibrations in the vocal chords seems extraordinarily demanding as a very physical translation theory. Nevertheless, this essay argues that the task of the theatre translator and its somatic demands grow even more complex when First Nations and Aboriginal drama "makes its passage" through the tongues and bodies of translators and actors in contemporary Japan.

The plays discussed in this essay, The Rez Sisters by First Nations playwright Tomson Highway and Up the Ladder by Australian Aboriginal playwright Roger Bennett, were both performed in Japanese by the Tokyo-based Rakutendan theatre group. The plays themselves are intimately concerned with the politics of representation as well as interpretation, so it matters who tells these stories and who enacts them onstage. In their performance by Japanese actors, the politics of theatre translation come into play as well because "the physical connection to the living history of these stories has been broken by the play's journey to Japan—one cannot simply 'act' indigenous."³ The Rakutendan productions, then, are provocative because contemporary performances of these plays in Canada or Australia, for example, would likely acknowledge the sensitive issue of cultural appropriation by casting Native actors to play the roles. For theatre audiences as well, the "adequacy or inadequacy of a performance cannot deny the interference of non-Other playing Other."⁴ More importantly, as Aboriginal director and playwright Wesley Enoch, who collaborated as a director on Rakutendan's production of Up the Ladder emphasized in a post-performance talk, "In indigenous productions, the politics of the play are written on the body." The question that motivates this essay is: what then are the politics of theatre translation of such plays? The Japanese bodies onstage seem to erase the somatic representation of the political, but a closer consideration of Rakutendan's productions suggests that the missing body is a deliberate translation strategy that allows the First Nations and Aboriginal playwrights to tell their stories as well as allow the performances to address the particular situation of assimilated and invisible minorities in Japan.

The plays themselves resist a verisimilitude or essentialism that is so often a central concern in representations of indigenous people in all genres.⁵ Their casting and production in Japan not only call into question the mythic homogeneity of the Japanese, but also assist the playwright in undermining the representation of indigeneity as homogeneous and unchanging. In short, the First Nations and Aboriginal plays speak of and perform how indigenous bodies come to matter...