This year’s ALTA keynote, which was delivered by Jadine Pluecker, took the ALTA49 (2026) conference attendees in at least one new direction: lip-syncing!
ALTA keynote addresses have often broached new ground, crossing borders — into deafness, humor, singing below your range, friendling, broken bodies, broken countries, belletrism. Jadine did a bit of some of this kind of crossing, too, but she also introduced her own innovations to the format.
Some of the lucky attendees, for example, received flowers as she walked around the large room with the ugly carpet, handing them out individually. Once or twice she walked too far from the tech for the clicker to work, which occasioned a mild diatribe against the clicker and, mockingly, against herself, for straying too far afield. “Why are you going so far, Jadine? You’re going too far again, Jadine! You’ve broken the clicker again!” This may or may not have been planned, but it was definitely part of the performance.
She framed her remarks by means of a pair of false-friends in Spanish and English: travesti, meaning possibly cross-dresser or possibly transgender; and travesty, meaning something distorted or absurd, possibly unfair in its implications. It was a brilliant opening, as it opened the words and their associated uses, ideas, and assumptions up to scrutiny. She was quick to point out that, while formed from the same roots, their meanings suggest very different attitudes and orientations towards crossing.
I was right with her here, as I’ve been using very different material to suggest rather similar ideas about mixture and impurity in my Sea of Intimacy. So it was in a sense familiar territory. It was also delightful to see how she developed this initial thought, which appears so simple on its surface, into other kinds of border crossing, including the U.S.-Mexico border and the rules of drag queen lip-syncing.
The only place I hesitated was at the end, when she landed on liberation as — it seemed to me at least — her final and most important message. Now, liberation and release were also built into the talk and floated through it with regular clips of water rushing wildly through desert landscapes. Jadine did not explain these: she merely said she’d been finding them especially pleasing or moving of late.
Then she played the first one, then later the second, then a third. Each time, a parched landscape suddenly was inundated as if by a flash flood initiated somewhere upland. The camera would wait for it, its holder stepping out of the way, then turning to watch it flow on, carrying broken trees and garbage with it. There was no music, just the sound of wind, water, sometimes people talking about it, laughing a bit hysterically. This was liberation and release, something like the stikhiinost’, or elemental spontaneity, of socialist realism, but delivered as a personal rather than collective experience.
So the note of liberation at the end, when she basically told her audience to go out and do what they wanted, didn’t come out of nowhere. But it did clash a bit with other parts of the performance.
The lip-syncing Violetta (Violet Chachki) triumphed in the end of the minor drama we were momentarily drawn into not by doing what she wanted but by expressing herself within the rules, which are in fact rather strict as rules go. The story could just as easily have been used to justify learning to work within the rules as learning to free oneself of them.
I found the same true of the various “ultratranslations” offered throughout the performance. These were a lot like what feminist translators of the 1990s would have called “hijackings,” in which the translator chose to highlight something from the source for ideological purposes or to express something the translator thought was important.
They were entertaining and often humorous. But they invariably depended for their meaning and effect on our knowing the rules, knowing the “right” words, especially when Jadine was telling us the words meant one thing when those in the audience with Spanish could see they meant something very different. This had many in the audience in stitches, and maybe also feeling a little surreptitious, as they were in on something that not everyone in the audience was getting.
But the rules were the foundation for the effect, and the liberation would have fallen flat without them. I wondered if the message wasn’t just a bit more keyed to an audience of authors than an audience of translators, who are invariably obsessed with finding the right word.
Or maybe, on the other hand, it was deliberate on her part. Maybe she sensed all the pent-up stress in the room about the need to get it exactly right, especially with the supposed perfection of AI looming, and she determined to give us a little rest.
If not a break from the rules, at least a little lip-syncing.
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