Disability and Drama: Signing as Gestural Theatre

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Disability and Drama Signing as Gestural
Theatre

• Inclusive learning through technology
• Damien French

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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.

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• 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.

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American Sign Language (ASL)

• The dominant sign language of the U.S. and
  Canadian deaf community, also used
  internationally.
• A visual language.
• Not combinations of sounds.
• Hand-shapes palm orientations movements of the
  hands, arms and body location in relation to the
  body facial expressions.

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ASL has its own

• Grammar
• Phonology..
• Morphology
• Semantics
• Syntax
• Pragmatics
• Dialects
• Regional variations
• African American ASL

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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.

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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.

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From Text to Performance

• Your eye is caught everywhere by the movement of
  the language onstage its 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)

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Models / Experiments

• Japanese theatre.
• The Kabuki form.
• Narrators stand to one side while the performers
  move out the action.

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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 Hughess Orghast and Peter Handkes Kasper.
• Experimenting with a universal language for
  theatre.
• A language of pure concrete sounds.
• Experiments with abstract sounds used by the
  deaf.

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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.

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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.

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1950 Akira Kurosowa film, Rashômon
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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.

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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.
  

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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.

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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.

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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).