Podcast series:
Borderlands: Performative Acts across Language, Culture and Media

The series of podcasts listed below emerged from the seminar “Borderlands: Performative Acts across Language, Culture and Media” (2021), which looked at processes and regions of transfer (cultural, linguistic and medial) in a variety of contexts. Exploring analogies and connections between theatrical ‘trans-lations’ (e.g. adaptations, page-to-stage processes and vice versa), interlingual translation, processes of cultural transfer but also acts of translating the self, we have come to understand translation in a wide sense as performative practice that creates as much as it recreates.

Life & Times of Michael K  (2021)
Foto: Fiona Macpherson

A collaboration with “Festival Theater der Welt” allowed us to explore the realisation of a performance of Life & Times of Michael K, based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel of 1983. In addition, we researched acts of border crossing and border policing in the fields of migration, race relations and conviviality in the Atlantic World, as well as performative acts testing normative b/orders in the realm of gender identification. Works investigated in the resulting podcasts are Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet, poems from Jay Bernard’s collection Surge, Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and its adaptation by the Handspring Puppet Company and Lara Foot.

The annotated podcast scripts as well as two interviews emerging from the project have been published here.

Leslie Fried & Kathrin Hettrich
Adapting Life & Times of Michael K: J.M. Coetzee’s Novel and the Handspring Puppet Company

Mandy Bartesch & Özlem Dagdelen
Jay Bernard and The Angel of History

Chiara Timbone
The Representation of Queer Black Identity in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016) and Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019)

Leonie Slak
Trumpeting Change: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1999) and Transgender Media Representation

The realization of the podcasts was enabled by HHU Düsseldorf’s
e-learning fund (eLFF). Explorative, collaborative research into the
field and the realization of a series of public, dialogic formats
which inspired the work leading to the podcasts were made possible by
HHU’s format “Bürgeruniversität in der Lehre”.

More information about the series of events and activities can be found on the project page Staging Wor(l)ds, Embodiments: Performance and Translation.