“Language is unstable. It’s just a fiction.” In her new work, Apologia, writer and performer Nicola Gunn is taking on the barriers language puts between us.
When Nicola Gunn was a teenager, she picked up three different copies of Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’sin a bookstore to work out which cover she liked. Then she looked at the first page of each, and her understanding of language changed forever.
“When I was younger I had this romantic idea of Frenchness,” says Gunn. “That it was the epitome of sophistication, elegance and philosophical intellectualism. It’s the romanticisation and the mythology of it that interests me. We all do it, whether it’s people who have a thing for Japan or somewhere else. France is really a placeholder for anyone wanting to feel different. If I feel French, will I be different?”is a wide-ranging and irreverent conversation.
Gunn herself lives in a tangle of cultural identities. Born in England, she moved to Australia when she was a child , and is now an associate professor at the University of Bergen, Norway.Gunn’s theatre work often plays with complex questions of making art and communicating. Previous shows have focused on the pretentious world of high-art academia, and the creative issues arising from bringing children into creative practice. Now she’s taking on the barriers language puts between us.
“I don’t understand the language, so I don’t understand the culture,” she says. “Even if I did learn it, I wouldn’t know it. It’s so deeply embedded. There’s a lens between you. You can’t get there.”Gunn met Magois when she started researching translation and interpretation for a theatre piece that became.
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