The Fence/JANUS

The Fence is a network of European playwrights and new writing facilitators set up in 2003 and curated by writernet of which I was Chair. The network has developed through a series of twice-yearly meetings at theatre festivals and events across Europe with a focus on rethinking cultural diversity in terms of cultural mobility.

In fostering relationships between playwrights and facilitating them to work across cultures, The Fence has created a series of international collaborations, including Acts of Translation, a series of exchanges between playwrights in Paris and London exploring common ground and structural differences in order to rethink the role of the playwright in our culturally diverse societies, and the experimental, collaborative writing project, BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk.

A further project, JANUS, was an international investigation into the mobility of playwrights and playwriting conducted by The Fence. Sixteen plays from emerging and established playwrights drawn from across Europe were translated in close collaboration with fellow playwrights and staged at theatre festivals in Finland, Austria and the UK during meetings of The Fence with the support of the West Yorkshire Playhouse (UK), Tampere Theatre Festival (Finland), Uni-T (Austria) and Theater Instituut Nederland (Holland).

Documentation of the project was published in JANUS European New Writing in Translation by Alumnus (2007) with an introduction in which I outlined the critical concerns and ethos of The Fence together with the specific aims of our JANUS project.

Will I Pass?

Crossing by train from Belarus to Lithuania, from one round of guards and documents and checks along the fenced-in miles of track to the next stop of dogs and uniforms and questions, something happened to the subdued voices of the people in my compartment: they stopped. Silence came in through the open windows. It entered as palpably as the coolness of the night coming on, the rhythm of the rail settling down once more into its long haul, the look of the landscapes sliding backwards. It could be heard, and you could see it. Or was it because, speaking no language that left with me from Minsk or linked to Vilnius, I heard the silence of papers, travel passes, permits rustled and re-evaluated, and saw in the faces a silent, unspoken, underlying anxiety of travellers at the prospect of borders – Will I pass?

I’ve been passing as a European in Africa and an African in Europe a long time. That I look different – an outward sign, difficult to read, of a stranger, someone you don’t know – has meant I’ve been able to use visible difference as a cloak under which to pass as invisibly as I can about my task, as a writer, of silent translation – I am, like you, someone who falls silent at borders.

The legendary Polish writer, Ryszard Kapuścińsky, who was born near Minsk before Poland was translated westward by the Second World War, spoke of this silence on approaching the border areas of his own country at a time when the Cold War and its Iron Curtain had divided Europe into estranged and opposing camps:

… how silent the border zone was. This mystery and quiet attracted and intrigued me. I was tempted to see what lay beyond, on the other side. I wondered what one experiences when one crosses the border. What one feels? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side? It must certainly be – different. But what does “different” mean? What does it look like? What does it resemble? Maybe it resembles nothing that I know, and thus is inconceivable, unimaginable? ... I wanted only one thing – the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border.
(Ryszard Kapuścińsky, Travels with Herodotus, Penguin Allen Lane, 2007, p.9)

The borders of Europe changed again after 1989, when East Germans invaded Czechoslovakia to escape through to the West and brought down the Berlin Wall by voting with their feet. In a sudden burst of renewal, people started to move – crossing borders, talking to each other, informing each other in new ways. Silence was no longer an option in the economic and social revolution of digitalisation that followed. Conversations in every direction imaginable became possible. Europe was on speaking terms with itself again. But borders have a way of retrenching themselves (as many sprang up as disappeared), and new questions arose about the political, economic and social project of European integration: What are the borders of Europe? Is Europe a good idea? Do I have any say what happens? Who are we in this Europe with?

I was Chair of writernet when it organised and launched The Fence, a network of European playwrights and facilitators which met regularly to ask these questions and foster those new conversations. We were interrogating together the idea of a common European future as artists whose medium – the social space of theatre – most directly focused its challenges. Our chosen themes of cultural diversity and the mobility of the artist were played out through a process of meeting together in different European cities – cross a border and you experience them for yourself. Once playwrights from across Europe (and from outside Europe) are talking and collaborating with each other, where will it end?

Out of this heady mix of informal meetings, the building of relationships, visits to European theatre festivals and exchanges of thinking about our practice arose the desire to directly experience one another’s work. The issue of translation arose, and in response to it came the idea that as playwrights we could be the translators and adaptors of one another’s plays. Playwright to playwright we could become creative collaborators in spiriting our plays across the borders of language and cultural context, giving them new lives that reflected the inter-connectedness of ours. Rather than thinking of translation as a mechanism for circulating products in the form of play texts, our focus was on the movement of people. The resulting project was devised to make the act of translation one which treated both writers as whole artists possessed of their own social, cultural and theatrical contexts, and one which would produce work which looked both ways – the Janus project. Theatres and festivals in Finland, Austria, the Netherlands and the UK became host to meetings of The Fence in which the experiences of the Janus translations unfolded as rehearsed readings, discussions and feedback from the playwrights. What happened when they met? What did they discover? What was lost in translation? What was gained in the exchange?

One writer describes himself has having ‘lent’ his voice to the playwright he was translating, a situation in which he was effectively providing a ‘visa’ through an act of ‘ventriloquism’ for it to pass to a new audience. In reaching for metaphors to capture the experience he finds a conspiracy of writers akin to people-smuggling – if lending someone a visa and speaking for them at immigration does describe something of the way identity, voice and belonging are policed in our theatre cultures. Another writer describes her collaboration as having involved her as one of ‘two mothers nurturing the same baby’ – a domestic situation which appears to challenge orthodoxy, but not if we reflect on the role of the wet nurse. Have we lost sight of other approaches to creativity in the nurturing of our theatre cultures? The insights contained in this book’s account of the Janus project are open to revision and reflection on the part of all its participants and the reader who encounters the project here.

For me, as a participant in The Fence, the Janus project represents a move away from the idea of translation as an equivalent of the theatrical ‘quick change’. Translation now involves a slower, more collaborative and thoughtful exchange of clothes, fabrics, feels, customs, costumes, identities and possibilities between the players. The travesty is no longer a bad translation, but the deliberate strategy – the temporal drag of two playwrights focused on the process of one play becoming naturalised in another language, theatre culture and place than the one that gave it birth. And it lies in the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border.

Gabriel Gbadamosi, Introduction, JANUS European New Writing In Translation (Alumnus, 2007)