Dancing with the dust: translating ask the dust to the stage

Abstract

This essay reconstructs the process of creating DUST, an original dance-theatre adaptation of John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust. The essay details the director’s work with student actors, faculty designers, and production team, and explores the methods used in the process of devising this adaptation. The performative relationship between movement and language, words and choreography, is emphasized throughout. Character analysis focusing on the tangled histories of Camilla and Arturo as outsiders suggests the persistence of loss that attends the experience of displacement caused by emigration, exile, and other such dislocations. The writing in the essay seeks to replicate the imaginative process of creating an embodied translation of this haunting novel.