Dance Magazine: For Deaf audiences, watching performances with traditional sign language interpretation can feel like watching a tennis match: Their focus has to toggle between whatever is happening onstage and the interpreter, often off to the side, who might be communicating what the music sounds like or what’s being said. That’s if the performance even has an interpreter, which all too often is not the case.
5 comments:
Two articles about ASL in one week?! Yes! I am so excited about this. I spent all four years in high school learning ASL and learning about the deaf community. I also happen to be someone who sees a lot of live theater and as the industry starts moving towards including more interpretation I have always thought about how annoying it must be to watch the interpreter and try to watch the show at the same time. I really liked that sentence that explained that deaf people understand it more than someone who is hearing yet someone that is hearing does not lose out on the experience. I have always thought that ASL has a dance-like feeling to it and I think that blending the two together is a really good idea.
This intersection between ASL and dance is fascinating to me. While I don’t have any experience with ASL, I grew up dancing and specifically trained in the styles of Graham and Horton, which emphasize the visual communicative language found through the hinges, sweeps, and turns. I’m just glad dance is being recognized as the language it is. While less specific than written or oral language, it has the intrinsic ability to communicate ideas and concepts. Attack Theatre in Pittsburgh does this beautifully! One quote that stuck with me was, “The intersection of the two embodied forms offers limitless creative potential, and the vital opportunity to make accessibility efforts less perfunctory and more integrated and enriching.” Dance is a visual language, and ASL is as well. The two should fit together. I am curious as to how to establish the audience for this dance and ASL combination. As understanding verbal language is not necessary for storytelling, I find this combination as a great way to improve accessibility and audience scale.
Although ASL theater is not new to me, as I worked for a theater company that primarily worked with deaf and disabled artists all throughout my high school theater career I understand that in the general scheme of things it is something that is new to the industry and I'm thrilled that it's becoming more mainstream. One concern I always have with ASL theater is that sometimes signs get changed to the point where deaf audiences cannot understand the performance without an interpreter. I know this happened with Deaf West’s Spring Awakening which was on Broadway in the 2010s. This article did address some of my concerns when talking about who theater and ASL was for. I really hope that this type of theater becomes more mainstream as it does make theaters so much more accessible and easier to watch for those who use ASL as their primary method of communication. Overall I am excited to see ASL make its way into the world of dance.
I thought this article was super interesting, and I really enjoyed reading it. One big thing in theater right now is making performances more accessible. I have seen shows with translations, and some are definitely better than others. When I saw a production of the tempest at the globe theater in London they had translators signing the lines of each of the characters, but they also became the characters physically. I think this is a really clever way of integrating American Sign Language into the theater piece, rather than just having captions for translations, making it a more interactive experience. I think it’s really smart that American Sign Language is being mixed with Dance because Dance is already a nonverbal language that can speak to so many and transcend so many boundaries. I’d be really excited to go see one of these shows and see how ASL, and for the dance, how the dance for ASL and how the lines between them blur and disappear.
I am very excited to see so many articles about disabilities on this website in the past few weeks. I think that dance is a perfect way to combine ASL into a piece. While I don’t think it makes as much sense with pieces that are to instrumentals, as the point is for the language to be to movement, it is such a lovely addition to musicals where the choreography is an extension of the words being sung by the actors. I’m glad that a lot more conversations are happening about incorporating ASL and interpreters in theater. Especially as some people are seeming to be taking advantage of it, like the deaf performer during the NFL halftime show that slandered Rhianna’s superbowl interpreter, even though he himself isn’t one. I think that is an interesting balance that will have the form of dancing with ASL versus actually interpreting as they have been shown to be two different things.
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