This last week I have not had any language exchanges as my partners are in their home towns and with their families for the Spring Festival. So, I’ve concentrated upon the performance’s form a bit more and I’ve hit a tricky and important phase in the making of it. I have been thinking a lot and trying things out and they don’t quite work as clockwork. What I cannot tell from here is whether that is because I still need to get a better grip on my material or whether it is because the basic game I am proposing is not coherent enough. Of course I am hoping it is the former and I am working through some or the ideas in a more practical way to see how they take shape. But I cannot yet tell if I will need to make some larger changes.
My ideas/structure board probably reflects this state of affairs: many things circling around up in the air. There is now a lot of yellow from post it notes, but no simplicity or pattern in the structure yet. There is time to arrive at this, I am not half way through the residency yet, but I will need to start shaping it soon so that I can properly develop my material within the structural form I choose. Of particular concern here is anything for which I have to speak Mandarin. For example, I translated and then printed my KLM/Air France letter of complaint and tried reading it out loud. I had the sense that my broken and phonetic way of speaking must be quite painful and frustrating to listen to for any length of time. I will get some slack as a Westerner making an effort but I should not exploit this and allow that to be an excuse for a dull performance. It is clear to me that in order to make the performance have some rhythmic variation I will need to be able to speak a bit more quickly or else limit my talking. I have however found the tone and relationship to the public that I want to work with; it should be clear that I am not sure about what I am doing and saying and that I require their goodwill and active ears and eyes of those present to fill in the blanks.
On the plus side, I have found people who can act as my ‘translators’ in the different cities I will perform in here in China. They will all face the opposite problem of mine, namely that of having to slow down their natural fluency in English and make their speech sound a bit more like broken Chinglish. That should be OK but I will have to be clear whether they are faithfully reading what they believe to be a good translation and they are doing their personal best or whether the ‘bad translation’ is actually the most faithful to the spirit of what I am doing and their role is to try to transmit the struggle for expression in a foreign language. For this last possibility it can be done with no need to act so this is what I will probably do, but, not acting can be just as hard as acting so finally it is no simpler than the other option.
Out and about in the city I have been noticing how the natural environment does not conform to my expectations. The plants are often unfamiliar and look like something out of a movie but the most simple and graphic example of the natural environment causing me to stop and look again to try and understand it, is the moon. With all the attention on it for the Spring Festival, or lunar new year as it is also known, it took me a little time to really notice how it is viewed at a different inclination here. It is lit by the sun from below rather than from the side. Being no astronomer I cannot say with confidence that we never see this in the West but I have a feeling this is not the moon that I know.
