Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and Lark Play Development Center
to Co-Host International Conference
Global Playwrights, Translators to Discuss Merits and Issues
of International Collaboration Over 3-Day Residency
Waterford, CT - The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center will co-host the first North American gathering of The Fence at its Waterford campus from January 20-22. The Fence is an international network for “working playwrights and people who make playwriting happen,” and is interested promoting greater international collaboration between theater artists. In its tenth year, the network comprises over 200 members from 40 countries.
Domestic partners include Melissa Hardy of The Play Company, Doug Howe of New International Theatre Experience, and John Eisner, Lisa Rothe, Michael Robertson and Catherine Coray of the Lark Play Development Center.
The initial convening at the O’Neill is intended as a retreat and planning session for a much larger convening in January 2015. Members will explore issues related to theatre translation, and begin the process of developing scripts for translation. After departing the O’Neill, The Fence will reconvene in New York City, hosted by Lark Play Development Center.
The overarching focus of these two gatherings is the art of translation. Noted literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, “Translation is a necessary impossibility,” and The Fence plans to investigate this paradox by engaging in both in-depth dialogue and hands-on exploration so that it may discover innovative solutions to the complex challenges of translating for the stage.
The Fence
How do culture and politics influence the act of translation? How do culture and language intersect in the act of translation? How does one translate the untranslatable? What does translation make possible? The Fence aims to learn how theater collaborators seize texts, share them, move into them, bring them to life and make them their own, by exploring the meaning of intercultural theatre, and what is behind these exchanges and encounters.
About the O'Neill:
Founded in 1964, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center is the country’s preeminent organization dedicated to the development of new works and new voices for American theater. In the bold tradition of its namesake Eugene O’Neill – four-time Pulitzer Prize Winner and America’s only playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature – the O’Neill has been home to more than 1,000 new works for the stage and to more than 2,500 emerging artists. Scores of projects developed at the O’Neill have gone on to full production at other theaters around the world, including Broadway, Off-Broadway, and major regional theaters.
Recipient of a 2010 Tony Award for Regional Theatre and 1979 Tony Award for Theatrical Excellence, O’Neill programs include the National Playwrights Conference, National Music Theater Conference, National Critics Institute, National Puppetry Conference, Cabaret & Performance Conference, and the National Theater Institute (NTI). NTI offers intensive theater training programs for academic credit, including the Moscow Art Theater Semester (MATS), a semester of study abroad, as well as the six-week summer program Theatermakers.
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