Translation in the Welsh-Khasi Cultural Exchange: Contemporary Performance and Embodied Experience

This chapter explores processes of translation in contemporary performance outputs by the Khasi-Cymru Collective, stemming from a transcultural practice-research project between researcher-practitioners from India and Wales, including the devised post-dramatic work, Performing Journeys, and the album ‘Sai-thaiñ ki Sur (weaving of voices). These contemporary works respond to the history of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Mission in the Khasi-Jaiñtia Hills, Meghalaya, between 1841 and 1969, from which numerous intercultural texts, both oral and written, were circulated and embedded in both Khasi and Welsh cultures. The authors consider the role of translation in the creative process of making performance between/across two cultures and how collaboratively devised performance practices might reveal the power relationships concealed within historic translations. Practice-research revealed that performers hold an invaluable repertoire of embodied knowledge that is crucial to interpreting the historic transcultural exchange from a contemporary perspective, and that performance enables a fluid translation of cultural entanglements from several different points of view.