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Disability and Drama: Signing as Gestural Theatre

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

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Disability and Drama: Signing as Gestural Theatre

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  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.

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

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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)

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

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 1950 Akira Kurosowa film, Rashômon

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. 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”.

  18. 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).

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