Download 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.
• These formal means are used to explore the
construction of difference.
• See Kanta KocharLindgren. ‘Between
two worlds: the
emerging aesthetic of
the national theater of
the deaf’, in Peering
Behind the Curtain,
Fahy & King (eds),
Routledge, 2002.
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.
ASL has its own…
• Grammar
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Phonology…..
Morphology
Semantics
Syntax
Pragmatics
• Dialects
– Regional variations
– African American ASL
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.
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.
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-tobody listening.” (Kochar-Lindgren, 2002)
Models / Experiments
• Japanese theatre.
– The Kabuki form.
• Narrators stand to one side while the performers
“move” out the action.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
1950 Akira Kurosowa film,
Rashômon
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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).