Photo by Mikkel Høgh Kaldal
Soy Milk
Performance for five languages in canon: Norwegian, Swedish, English, German and Danish.
Translations by Julie Stokkendal, Markus Lantto, Saskia Vogel, Richard Stoiber and Kenn Mouritzen. Actors Minni Katina Mertens, Golshid Rokhzan, Alex Lehman and Constantin Gindele and dramaturg Gritt Uldall-Jessen, 2020
Five monologues in five different languages are performed in canon by actors, whose voices are interwowen in a dynamic arrangement. Sometimes individual sentences stand out, while others overlap and mirror each other in kaleidoscopic soundscapes.
The performance is based on a monologue originally written in Danish, in which a first person narrator talks about being in their apartment, listening to their neighbor through the wall, talking on the phone, reading emails and chatting with a friend, who lives on the other side of the Atlantic.
Language flows through several channels, communication and miscommunication happens, stories are told and assumptions are made. This original monologue has gone through a chain of translations: from Danish to Norwegian, from Norwegian to Swedish, from Swedish to English, from English to German and from German back to Danish. All five translations were made by litterary translators, and only the first translator in the chain got to se the original Danish text – the others had to follow their own instincts and thereby set the text in motion.
Performed at Kunsthal Aarhus, 2020
The narrator's gender is not mentioned in the monologues but is embodied by the performers in different ways. The gender of the narrators neighbour is also unclear, and this ambiguity is dealt with in different ways by the five translators, thereby illuminating how each language provides specific frameworks within or outside which we can understand and express gender that exists beyond the binary.
The title Soy Milk refers to a joke that appears in the monologue: What if soy milk is just milk introducing itself in Spanish? It plays on the word 'soy', which in English refers to the plant and in Spanish means 'I am'. There is an underlying point in the joke about not being understood when introducing yourself, because you seem to speak different languages: Our backgrounds and biases can make something appear quite definitely to different people, blinding us to ambiguity.
The five translated monologues were published as an artist book by Forlaget Aleatorik.