Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre

5. The Heteroglossia of Side Texts

5 The Heteroglossia of Side Texts The previous material in this study has concerned the type of heteroglossia that has been most widespread in the theatre throughout its history , considering the various strategies and various results involved when actors have utilized a mixture of languages and dialects on historical and contemporary stages. I will conclude with a dimension of theatrical heteroglossia quite different from that discussed in the rest of the book, a dimension that has really emerged only in recent years but that is very rapidly growing in importance in theatres around the world. This is a heteroglossia that presents simultaneously on the stage different languages, but involves both languages that are spoken and others that are not. When we use the term language in the theatre, we normally think only of spoken language, but the rise of modern semiotic theory encourages us to apply this term more broadly. Drawing upon linguistic analysis , the ‹rst modern theatre semioticians often spoke of the various “languages ” utilized in the theatre, as in the title of one of the ‹rst major books on the subject, Patrice Pavis’s Languages of the Stage.1 Since semiotic theory was concerned with the communicative process of the total theatre experience, these “languages” included the language of costume, of gesture, of scenery, of lighting, and so on. In this study I have so far considered language in its more conventional sense, in the form of words spoken by the actors on stage, what is usually referred to as the dramatic dialogue. Without broadening the idea of language as semiotics has done, to include all potential communicative systems on stage, however, I wish in this section to consider another way that language, more narrowly de‹ned, is utilized in the theatre and, more importantly for my present concern, has come to contribute directly to the play of languages on the modern stage. I am here speaking of language that operates not orally but visually. 180 The most common visual appearance of language on stage is that of the written text, from various printed signs in previous eras to the modern supertitle. Less obvious, but also important to the theme of this study, is another visual language that has grown steadily in importance in recent years, sign language. Each of these alternative language processes, beginning as simple translation devices, has recently grown beyond that function to enter more directly into the aesthetic frame of the theatrical production and thus into the play of language that is the subject of this book. Before addressing this more recent development, however, let us consider the framework in which these processes ‹rst appeared, that of translation, a framework that is almost always involved whenever the theatre utilizes more than one language. On-Stage Translation Whenever a language or dialect appears in a production that is not likely to be understood by a majority of the audience, it requires some sort of performance adjustment if full or general communication is desired. We have already seen a variety of strategies utilized at different periods for dealing with this problem, ranging from the straightforward presentation of alien languages that the audience is not expected to understand , as in David Edgar’s Pentecost, to the almost total, if inauthentic transparency of conventional stage dialects and accents, simply used as markers of an alien speech. In modern times, technological change has provided a variety of other means of assisting communication, most notably by simultaneous translations, either aural, normally by the use of earphones, or visual, in the form of supertitles. The use of such technical devices, and of other translation aids as well, has important effects upon theatrical reception, which will be one concern of this chapter, but another concern, perhaps less obvious, results from the fact that the modern stage, especially the experimental stage, is often highly self-conscious of its means of production and process of reception. Thus, as various mediating translation devices have become more familiar parts of the theatrical experience, these devices have themselves been consciously brought into the theatrical frame, adding what are in effect additional languages to the modern heteroglossic stage. The play of language in the modern theatre has broadened to include not only the encounter of 181 The Heteroglossia of Side Texts diverse languages, but the mechanics by which this encounter is negotiated and their own effect upon reception, thus bringing this sort of theatrical experimentation directly...