Introduction

Fluency is an interdisciplinary performance piece that deals with questions of language, identity, dance and translation. It revolves around a question that Jamaican-Canadian dancer and choreographer Peter Chin used as a premise. Can one become Nicaraguan? More broadly, can one become an Other? Fluency sought to address this question. Over a two-year period, Peter Chin traveled to Nicaragua with the “utopian mission” of transforming himself into a Nicaraguan, partly through learning the Spanish language. Chin translated his failures and successes in Nicaragua, and in learning Spanish, into a kinetic language, and his improvisations were videotaped so they could be “retranslated” by dancer Alison Denham. The dance-narration was structured as a faux talk show, led by actor Billy Marchenski, with translation scholar María Constanza Guzmán as an invited “guest specialist” who commented on director-choreographer-performer Chin’s “social experiment” and Denham’s retranslated movements.

Fluency was created between 2010 and 2011 and was performed in Toronto in November of 2011. This testimonial, written for Tusaaji, includes Chin’s and Guzmán’s memories of and reflections on the creation process. It is accompanied by three Fluency video clips relevant to the questions they are addressing in their comments.