Fluid borders: From Carmen to The Car Man. Bourne’s ballet in the light of post-translation

Abstract This paper takes Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man as an example of today’s enlarged definition of translation, following Maria Tymoczko’s, Susan Bassnett’s, Edwin Gentzler’s and other, new post-positivist approaches to contemporary translation. Bourne’s post-translation offers an up-to-date version of Bizet’s world: he deconstructs genres and genders by subverting opera and dance, but also straight and gay binary oppositions, thus creating richer and more ambiguous identities and characters. Bourne’s translation in The Car Man wants his intersemiotic rewriting of the past to be more down to earth and more real, taking ballet and opera closer to a new audience. The Car Man is a paradigm of crossroads which breaks away from linear discourses and binary oppositions and which opts for less common lines and different angles. In sum, a contemporary translation.