Translation and adaptation of contemporary northeastern Brazilian drama through devising for performance: a case study of Aldri Anunciação's 'Namíbia, Não!'

This thesis aims to study the use of devising techniques in the translation of contemporary Northeastern Brazilian plays for an English-speaking audience. It focuses on the analysis of the process of translation of Aldri Anunciação's Namíbia, Não! (2011) through working with a cast of two actors alongside the playwright and a creative team in order to develop an English-language play text. The thesis explores and develops an approach to translation based on a collaborative devising methodology. It examines a process of developing a dramaturgical translation that allows members of the creative team, especially actors, to contribute to the production of the play text. In this way, I analyse to what extent this process generates different approaches and solutions to the challenges of cultural translation. In order to compare and contrast this process, I make use of my previous experiences as translator of O Cego e O Louco by Cláudia Barral (2001) and as dramaturg for Franko Figueiredo's adaptation (2015) of Jorge Amado's novel Tieta.

The cultural context of the Brazilian Northeast is brought to the stage in the religious melodramas, in the afflictions brought by an environment made hostile due to poor infrastructure or social mobility, and in the characters' dreams of making their way out of the 'drylands'. In Anunciação's play, the main characters leave Salvador and move to Rio de Janeiro as students; in Amado's novel, an outcast daughter returns to her small village in the Recôncavo Baiano, after making her fortune in São Paulo. Perhaps only in Barral's text are the characters not defined by their relationship to their regional environment, but by their familial bonds in a restrictive environment. In this context, Namíbia, Não! was the first Brazilian play to take such a profoundly intersectional approach to themes such as racial discrimination and the Northeastern diaspora. My approach is informed by my experience as an actor, director and dramaturg. It sees translation skills as the core of any theatre devising process, as each and every step of a stage play - from the words written or agreed by cast as script to the performance moment observed by its intended audience members - is an act of translation, a reconfiguration of specific and diffuse aspects of culture. The practice explored in this thesis articulates the translator as a theatre practitioner and as an intrinsic part of the theatre-making process leading to production. Through working on Namíbia, Não! I bring to light the challenges involved in translating a representation of Brazil's complex attitudes to the relations between race, ethnicity and, as articulated by Anunciação, melanin levels.

The thesis offers an exploration of the process that led to the production of texts in which translation and/or adaptation for its new cultural environment were required during my practical engagements with theatre ensembles in the UK. It engages with collective and collaborative approaches in order to suggest methods for translators who wish to translate from their mother tongue (in this case, Portuguese) into a new acquired language (in this case, English). An emerging goal is to continue to develop an autoethnographic approach to theatre translation, and to the role of the theatre translator in the production of a stage text.

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