Disability and Drama: Signing as Gestural Theatre

1. Disability and Drama: Signing as Gestural Theatre Inclusive learning through technology Damien French

2. Lecture Aim • To introduce the work of the US National Theater of the Deaf. • Their work uses American Sign Language (ASL) to experiment with and extend formal possibilities. • These formal means are used to explore the construction of difference.

3. See Kanta Kochar-Lindgren. ‘Between two worlds: the emerging aesthetic of the national theater of the deaf’, in Peering Behind the Curtain, Fahy & King (eds), Routledge, 2002.

4. American Sign Language (ASL) • The dominant sign language of the U.S. and Canadian deaf community, also used internationally. • A visuallanguage. • Not combinations of sounds. • Hand-shapes; palm orientations; movements of the hands, arms and body; location in relation to the body; facial expressions.

8. ASL has its own… • Grammar • Phonology….. • Morphology • Semantics • Syntax • Pragmatics • Dialects • Regional variations • African American ASL

9. US National Theater of the Deaf • Active since late 1950s. • Originally envisioned a theatrical venue to showcase ASL. • Experimentation with combination of ASL and speech. • Both signing and speaking performers on stage at same time.

10. From Text to Performance • Challenging the traditional limits of language. • ASL permits a unique performative dimension. • Implicit in ASL is the use of the body as pictorial expression and enactment of meaning. • Multi-sensory, kinesthetic. • Expressiveness and tonality of gesture combined with speech.

11. From Text to Performance • “Your eye is caught everywhere by the movement of the language onstage; it’s like sculpture in the air.” David Hays (Quoted in Kochar-Lindgren, 2002). • “Because a language of shape and space is emphasized rather than a language of speech, understanding unfolds through a type of body-to-body listening.” (Kochar-Lindgren, 2002)

12. Models / Experiments • Japanese theatre. • The Kabuki form. • Narrators stand to one side while the performers “move” out the action.

13. Models / Experiments • NTD known for its work on Baschet sculptures. • Large instruments are made into sculptures. • Both sonic (musical and vibrational) and visual significance. • Collaboration with Peter Brook. • Ted Hughes’s Orghast and Peter Handke’s Kasper. • Experimenting with a universal language for theatre. • A language of “pure concrete sounds”. • Experiments with abstract sounds used by the deaf.

14. An Aesthetic of Multiple Voices • Meta-theatrical: • Beyond what is said, draws attention to the manner of its telling. • Stages how meaning, identity and subjectivity – and therefore deafness – are not found, but are socially constructed.

15. Example: In a Grove • 1986 NTD play based on a Japanese short story by Ryonosuke Akutagawa. • Uses the ‘Rashômon’ technique of relating a story through several viewpoints, foregrounding their relativity. • Seven consecutive testimonies regarding a murder: woodcutter, priest, policeman, mother, bandit, wife and husband. A silent judge.

16. 1950 Akira Kurosowa film, Rashômon

17. Example: In a Grove • The stories are fragmentary and conflicting, a unitary perspective is undermined. • The stage setting evokes an ill-defined flux; sparse, shadowy; sections of the grove form and reform. • Speakers step out from the trees, change their attire before speaking, return to obscurity.

18. Example: In a Grove • The metaphor is expressed through the changes in physical images. • The chorus is established not by what they say but how they are positioned and move through space. • We also see and hear voices in several registers.

19. Example: In a Grove • Voicing characters remain in the background of the grove, voicing what deaf performers sign once they emerge from it. • The deaf performers both embody and speak their story using sign. • Their stories deictic; dependent on context – that of their physical bodies in space.

20. Example: In a Grove • Although the Rashomon technique is not specific to deaf theatre, sign contributes to its enactment. • The combination of signing, speaking and sound effects (also visual sculptures) creates a sensory analogy to the multiple testimonies of the narrative. • A differentiated “writing in space”.

21. Example: In a Grove • Both: • An encounter with difference and its construction. • A shaking up of formal theatrical possibilities based on the normative, “normal hearing body” (Bauman, quoted in Kochar-Lindgren).