Translation and Translanguaging in Production and Performance in Community Arts

This thesis is an ethnographic investigation of the processes involved in producing a collaborative piece of street arts theatre. It addresses a current shift in theories of dynamic multilingualism, specifically translanguaging, towards the multimodal and the embodied. It asks how people make meaning across languages, cultures and practices. It also asks how people make meaning and perform meaning across spaces and places, about the resources they have and use, and how these resources are drawn on in multiple ways to make and perform meaning.
By taking the theatre of the street as its central concern, this research informs current understandings of multilingual and multimodal communication in arts-based settings. The findings extend theoretical understandings of translanguaging and further develop empirically grounded knowledge about how people communicate when developing a shared project.
A range of research approaches was adopted for this study, including linguistic ethnography, visual ethnography and sensory ethnography. The research focuses on the trans-semiotisation of a story – a thread - as it undergoes a series of transformations during the production process to become, in its final incarnation, a performance in the street. In focusing on collaborative street arts, it raises theoretical questions around the extent to which the concept of translanguaging can encompass the multimodal and the embodied. It also addresses a need for innovative approaches to understanding communication in transdisciplinary projects. Its findings are relevant across disciplines and sectors, including for cross-sector arts-based project settings, for street arts practitioners, and for arts-informed pedagogy and community arts. Methodologically, this study illustrates and evidences the centrality of ethnography as an approach to understanding communication across spaces and places. In particular, it highlights the role of short, intensive periods of ethnographic study within the context of a wider commitment to collaborative working and the insights made possible through this way of working.