“Carmen speaks five languages; Kai doesn’t really dance.”

In this performance, translation is being used to convey the experience to the audience. It is “a simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self” (Spivak 2012).

This piece investigates the invasive nature of translation between senses, genders, and languages. The lecture is inspired by gendered readings of sensory hierarchies, their impact on epistemology and metaphors of circus and carnival in contemporary explorations of this.

Miscommunication and the glitching of translation was interpreted through different theatrical mediums, depicting power games between a couple or between the personas of two artists. Scenes showcased fruitless and lurid attempts to understand another’s reality through various sensory interactions: a semi-synchronised dance, a performance act of twining thread into each other, contact improvisation and live multilingual interpretation occurring on the stage.

It is a fusion of performance art, (physical) theatre, dance, comedy, lecture perfor-mance and sound art, performed on the 2nd International Symposium of Performance Philosophy at the National Museum of Contemporary Arts, Athens, Greece.