 Okay, welcome to the ASL lecture series, this is the 13th presentation, this is Karen Christie and this is Dorothy Wilkins, Pete, the speaker's on. The title of this is the opening eyes, if you're curious as to what the lecture is about, opening eyes can be that like you're just full of amazement and just your eyes have been thoroughly just opened with full understanding, or it could possibly be that you just sort of, oh, come to an understanding and an acceptance, so really opening eyes can mean many various things to many different people. ASL literature, what are the ASL literary artists, you know who they are, and then examples of ASL literature, what would it look like if you saw it, what is literacy and what is the definition of literacy, and what is the connection between literature and literacy, and the final question, what does it mean to be literate in ASL, so of all these questions we will provide some answers, we'll expand on these questions, and then Karen Christie and I will both take turns, she will now speak about the history of ASL literature, a condensed timeline as to where ASL literature came from, she gave us some brief questions but there are many different questions, you know where did ASL literature come from, what is its history, you know what is its origin, you know what it was like pre-video and pre-film era, so how was ASL literature passed on, and what, so again we will look back upon a timeline here, early ASL literature, you know pre-video, pre-film era, for example, when the first deaf school was founded here in America, it was in 1817 correct, when they set up the American School for the Deaf, and when there was a gathering of many deaf children, so there was a lot of mingling and learning and camaraderie that went on in the deaf, in the dormitories at the American School for the Deaf, at that point the largest gathering of deaf people, or where people resided in large numbers was in Martha's Vineyard, and there were many different stories that were told, and as with any culture there were skilled storytellers within that culture, and then when they came to the deaf school, there were people that came from families who had generational deafness, and they passed on those stories and then passed them on horizontally to the other children at the school, and as with any other cultural group, the deaf community and within their culture has passed on the tradition of storytelling, with deaf literature one of the origins is it was passed on, you know, generationally deaf families, where the parents passed the stories on to the children, and the children when they went to the residential schools passed it on to other deaf children, so it was sort of instead of a vertical passing on or handing down, it was passed on horizontally, and through time things would change as always happens when things are done by word of mouth, you know, and as the story was passed on other people would add on, and you know, and it creates a tradition within the community, and it's one of the characters of ASL that has continued and persisted on through today, and with the onset of films in 1913 at that time the National Association for the Deaf was founded, and we have the old NAD films that we want to preserve that can, that gives us examples of American Sign Language at the time, and they have examples of political speeches and just presentations, formal presentations at the time, and there was some at the time that tried to make examples of that, well these were passed on as time went on, and finally we jump ahead to the 1960s, of course you know that Stokey has become an important person in our literature, he was the first person who worked as a linguist to discover grammatical features of ASL, and to really define it. He found that ASL was truly a language, and that brought the attention of many other people into the field, it impacted many people who are very creative in a very serious way. Ella May Lentz, this is her sign name, she's an important figure today for ASL poetry. Clayton Valley is also an important ASL poet, described their desire to express themselves within a type of poetry, so their process was to begin with the written word, and keep modifying it until they felt some sense of satisfaction, but they never felt completely satisfied with their work. When Stokey's realization hit the world that ASL was truly a language of its own, that had integrity, it started to let go of English as the language of origin for their creativity, and start to create directly in their own language of ASL where they were able to more comfortably modify and use their language skills. This is where ASL linguistic studies really got rolling. As discoveries related to ASL language and structure became more widespread, we started to see more of a tendency to study the culture of a people. In the 1980s, more and more cultural research was done related to the deaf people as a culture in America. Every group of people has their own cultural abilities and preferences and tendencies. One of them is that they share a traditional language and they share a language in which they pass on the stories of their culture. That gave rise to ASL literature studies. That's really just been a phenomenon of the past 10 years. It's a very new thing, but we're proud to say that the awareness mostly started here in Rochester. Imagine that. The pride that we feel in our literature and the pride that came out happened in 1990. There was the first ASL literature conference here. After that literature conference happened, 1991, we had an ASL lit conference here that focused only on the expression of poetry and stories, and that was a wonderfully unique experience. Then again in 1996, there was a national literature conference that Dorothy Deirdre Schleyhofer and I all presented at. Deirdre works at the U of R and she worked with Dorothy and I. We had kind of determined that we wanted to describe what ASL literature really was. That led to a number of discussions that were still engaged in to this day. We're both we're all fascinated in discovering the issues pertinent to ASL literature. But you know literature is a very broad category and can be subdivided into various genres and I'd like to turn it over to Dorothy now to give you some examples. ASL literature genres were first established by Nancy Fishberg back in 1980. She found three very specific genres and we later added a fourth in the 1996 conference. So I'd like to start with the first three genres. The first is ASL oratory. The second is ASL folklore or sign law. And the third is ASL performance arts. The fourth that we added was ASL visual arts. Now I'd like to expand on each of these topics. ASL oratory indicates the formal and stage type of presentational style. Perhaps a graduation ceremony. Perhaps a keynote address for a conference. And these are formal speeches. That we have a videotape of George Viditz and MJB Envenue. And some of the characteristics of oratory is that there's four very formal ASL usage as well as a very large signing style that covers a very large size space in front of the speaker. George Viditz is an older example but MJB Envenue has given a number of keynote addresses where you can see very specific oratory style. And some of the the evidences that we have of this type of style are really inspiring and very beautiful. We also have Chance and Duff Song. And one example is Voices of the Animals that was done at Duff Way where there was the use of rhythm, creativity, and a lot of movements that are similar in what you'd find in a chant or an art type of. And we will be showing Krull's videotape to show you an example of his work. Yet they're using the sign fun in a repetitive style and then the sign for enjoyment and then boat. Drink, drink, drink, drink, drink. Fun, fun, fun, fun. Joy, joy, joy, enjoy, enjoy. So that was done in an old-fashioned chant forum and today we still have that forum. Many of the deferturnedings and sororities still participate in their own types of chants that we lead. Gallaudet for many years had had this sign for the buff and blue and that indicated the number of varieties of the chant. Now eloquent speech and form oratory is what you usually find in the oratory genre. Now we will move to the ASL folklore and sign lore genre which have six subcategories. I want to show you different types of storytelling first as personified by Ben Dahan who's quite well known for his his work called Bird of a Different Feather. Next Stephen Ryan who has a work called I F. Sampspala for a decent thing the best whiskey in the west. Bonnie Kramer has a famous story that she tells called The Ugly Duckling that's a story that's intended for deaf children audiences in the schools. Patrick Raybal as you all know is quite a famous man and a teacher here in the performing arts and he has a quote or a famous word that he does according to Patrick where he talks about his experiences growing up in a school for the deaf. Finally we have Avon Black Robinson who's a black woman, an American deaf woman who comes from a deaf family and she has a work that she calls My Mother Loves Me. Now as you know alphabet number stories are a very common type of work in deaf culture using either the ABCs or the number line in order to personify a story. William Bam Coleman used to be an NTID student but now he's working on his BS degree elsewhere and he does this really wonderful story absolutely outstanding. Ben Bahan does does a really great story about the haunted house using A to knock on the door, B to open the door, and C to look around suspiciously. Now there's an example I want to show you for of some current folks who use the numbers one through 15 in a story called The Careless Indian and they're involved with a group called Eiffel for the Soul and we'd like to show you this example. These are two students here, Don Clepper, my own Palmer, and they have a one through 15 story. Another type of folklore is humor or tall tales and this is divided into four subcategories as well. We have humor about oppression, about play, signing play, about experiences and there's one more that I forgot. Visual imagery and gosh it was dark over there I couldn't see what I was doing. Mel Carter is one of the pioneers of teaching and he's in California and he's worked with older deaf people. CJ Jones is an African-American man who a long time ago was also an DID student and he does a lot with humor. Ellen Zola is an older deaf woman who who tends to do a lot with the work of senior citizens. Elin Jacobowitz is a deaf woman who tells stories related to a lot of humor and Mary Beth Miller is one of the founders of the National Theater of the Deaf and we would like to show you some of her work entitled Hand Talk. You know that these video tapes are very brief. I'd like to show you all of the people that we have here as examples today and I I would have to rent your eyes for the whole entire day because we have many great examples. See how she's playing with hand shapes and the two hands are talking with each other. The hands have become two different people. That's one good example of humor. Another story related to humor. We had a class a few years ago and Karen is going to tell you about how some humor came up in one of her classes. Maybe we should stand over here to a town called Knoxville. Lots of people were there for a convention because a miracle occurred. They said that people could learn high here. It's true that three the three of them were one man with a wheelchair, a woman who was blind and a deaf woman and they all wanted the cure. They all wanted to become healthy and all and so they went to this miracle place and the man with a wheelchair was so excited he went flying around and and the preacher saw him and said well what are you doing? So the preacher said you need to consider very closely and you need to pray really hard and so a lot of thinking and a lot of pray and went on got up out of his wheelchair and walked and he said I can't walk again and he happily left. The woman who was blind was brought up to the stage and the minister asked her what she desired. She said I really want to see again and he said will you think about it and we'll pray over you and so they prayed and they prayed and they prayed and the woman opened her eyes and she said I can see faces I can see colors. She was thrilled and she was ushered off to the side and then a deaf woman showed up on the stage and the minister said oh I see what you need and we prayed and they prayed and they prayed and then suddenly everybody was deaf. I'm just gonna tell you another story. I know you've heard a lot of things um a lot of jokes of the same nature and I'm sure that that uh you've heard other things in the nature of that joke and so I'm sure you've seen this joke modified so that when a person dies and goes to heaven the man in the wheelchair will be able to walk and the person who's blind will be able to see but a lot of us who are deaf say that the hearing world isn't all that perfect so why should we want to become perfect? It's kind of an SSI joke and so so people came up with the idea that sort of class a couple years ago we were where we would share those sort of stories and it was a really great experience so now we finished with the humor subcategory and now I'd like to turn to poetry. Poetry is really truly a wonderful art and there are two different theories that one uses to approach it. One can look at the space and the hand shape used and and the way one uses one's hands and the phonemes or you can think of it as just sort of overall beautiful art and I'll show you examples of both of these approaches. It also used to be an NTID. It established something called the Flying Words Project with Kenny Lerner who's still currently here. LMA Lens, a lot of expressive work that's pretty well known. She does a work called The Treasure, The Doors, a poem called To A Hearing Mother and her list of poetry is endless. Again, a former graduate of NTID who majored in art eventually. She does one called The Swan, The Veal Boycott, and The Black Hole. Again, Pat Grebel who's a famous storyteller. It's poetry work and one of them is called Liberation and The Surprise. Those are names of his famous poems. Now Clayton Valley will give you an example of his work. The first one is called The Cow and the Rooster. Now I remember I told you about one of the theories of approaches is to look at hand shapes and rhythms and meanings together and how the poem is situated. And we'll see how that plays out in poetry. Clayton came up with this poem. The girl who will perform his poem is Anna V. Baird whose parents are deaf. Did you recognize the use of hand shape? We use the Y for the cow and the five and the three. Some of the signs are not some that you'd see on a regular basis like this one or these. But that's a lot of play in poetry and that's not typically used in normal conversation. The next example we'll see was also produced by Clayton Valley. The hand shapes sort of beautiful and open. Now this one's very short, I warn you. Do you want to show the other part? Clayton used a very artistic way of producing this poem, but we'll show you this the same thing that produced in a different way. That's intended to be exactly the same poem, but you see it produced in a different way with the use of art. That's really amazing. And now we finish discussing poetry. The fifth is drama. Gil Eastman is famous for his creative performance. Sign Me Alice and Deaf President Now is a deaf woman who produces a one-woman show based on her life experiences as a deaf woman here in America and performed at the Deaf Women United in Seattle, Washington long ago and was incredible. Now Alan Wheelock and Charlie McKinney have put together a two-person show called Chalb. We have Lights On Deaf Theater again here from Rochester. Whoa, we're doing well. We have collected a number of plays written by deaf people, acted by deaf people, for an audience of deaf people. There's one of our types of literature. Category is called Performance Art which incorporates a number of different types of performing styles. Warner Zorn was a student at RIT who was cross-registered and actually he's still here now. And at an ASL Urgent Conference we taped him doing work related to South Africa and the characters of the animals that are there. It was really beautiful. Again, Pierre Cook was working with the Lexington School and also with the Fanwood students to create their own performances and the two of us would like to show you some of his work with some of the deaf students entitled, oh entitled November 22nd, 1963 was very hard. So we've talked about ASL Uritory and different types of folk stories. We've talked about performance art and drama and now we want to switch over to Kieran Christie and she's going to be talking about visual art. Now this isn't related to the first three categories that Nancy Frischberg discovered. Instead this is the story about her experience, 1996, as well as back in 91 during the Literature Conference. We all agreed that Frischberg's ideas were very very good but we felt that there was one more area that hadn't been identified and we felt that information was missing but needed to become part of the literature concept. So we developed the term called visual art in ASL and that included work in animation and film. There are a lot of features of literature that we see in this particular area. Now visual art doesn't include painting and photography, anything in a frozen form. It includes mostly work in film. Now I don't know if many of you remember Susan Vito Dupur. She worked here at NTID a few years ago. She was a student and then she became a faculty member and she taught English here. She was really outstanding in producing animated images that she would render by hand and then film and then put it together and she has a story called To Have, To Find and we call this a film and it's about her deaf experience growing up as if we're all drawing pictures and she drew pictures that looked like herself and as she would bring these pictures to her mother and her mother would put English to them. Later on when she went to school she often tended to daydream about her best friend who was her dog and she thought that it would be a great thing if he could communicate with her in ASL. So we feel that this is a very essential part of literature to be included. Our next example is from Tracy Salloway. Again a graduate from RIT and her animation is quite different. It's not based on drawings. It's based on computer graphics and uses a great deal of color in a very rich saturated tones. She produced a work called Flying Fingers and we can see a number of symbolism work in this particular thing including using hands as a cage and a number of symbols reoccur again and again to give a feeling of what the deaf experience is really all about. The colors really adds a depth and beauty to it that it's hard to describe. Her work is very abstract and then we come to three filmmakers. Now you know Charles Krull. You already saw some of his his work based on the drink drink drink example of the chant. Now he started producing films around the 1920s and really they could fit under the category of a documentary and he would go to real live deaf events and then film and then really capture the deaf experience through live documentary type film. Ernest Marshall also recently made a videotape that included some of Krull's work and that work was very different from the 1930s. He did some acting and and filming both and it started out as if he were making a movie that a deaf man was falling in love with another woman but he already had a woman and that was entirely a feature film. Squirsky lives around the Boston area and currently she works on films that have a very strong drama component about real-life serious issues that would occur in in drama and we have three different examples of these types of filmmakers who really value their deaf experience and incorporate that into their work. Now a lot of you guys know as I say has eaten such a cool guy and at the conference we've alluded to a number of times he produced a lot of work that he did on stage and then included storytelling and then also showed some of the films he produced and he moved back and forth between the three different types of performance work. He put the story and the film together in a way that overlapped and made a total picture. Lastly we have Sam Sipala who is someone as most of you know from hearing about him but he's made a videotape with a variety of handshake classifiers and film techniques which is called The Flight and we'd like to show you that one. So this is one of the reasons that we felt that we needed to add animation and film as a separate now these genres are not very strictly defined so that they can't be combined. English has a number of basic genres that often are used in combination with each other to produce a new effect. There's a woman named Roe whose last name I don't remember but she has performed in a different number of styles and so now that we've talked about literature and some of the people who are famous in the field some of them you already know we're going to put that aside not forget it but put it aside and talk about literacy and talk about how those are connected and we can describe what literacy means here. People often assume that literacy implies reading period if you see the word literacy you assume that someone can read and write the printed English word but more and more people today are studying English ASL and other languages and they say that literacy is not based only on reading and writing because just reading and writing isn't enough to get by in every day in the everyday world now there needs to be a deep understanding of how language works and how it's put together. So we've opened the definition for literacy today and now we have more of a contemporary view and the person who originated that idea was was Frere, Paulo Frere who wrote a book entitled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's a fairly famous book where he worked with people of oppressed cultures to develop their literacy skills and he noticed that when he was teaching them to read and write even if they accomplished that skill that was never enough they needed to use language in a creative way to become a more powerful person in the world and to be able to transform their lives. Maybe it would be better if we divided literacy into three different parts to explain each part. The aspect of literacy is functional literacy which means almost exactly the same as the traditional point of view of simply reading and writing. If one has basic skills in those that's good enough or being able to produce sign language and understand what other people are saying in a coherent way but it doesn't require a lot of serious in-depth analytical skills but just the type of vernacular speech you'd see in everyday life. Something that one could use with one's friends or out in the shopping environment and that's a very basic type of literacy skill. The next level in depth is what we might call cultural literacy. This means an understanding of the past background of the language and the people who use it. Cultural knowledge that applies to the common experience of the people who use the language and that's very important not only for reading but also for being able to understand ASL. It means that you don't just have a basic understanding of what's happening but that you can make a connection between the language that you're receiving as an input and feel the connection within your own life experience. So there's some level of analysis involved. Let me give you an example. Someone who has a very strong cultural orientation in Japan who's deaf and then comes to the United States very often can pick up American Sign Language through everyday use and exposure and if that sort of person were to sit and watch the film that we showed today November 22nd 1963 they might not have the cultural background and real understanding and knowledge of the history of the American people to understand that November 22nd in 1963 was a very important date for us and so they have maybe basic functional literacy but not the cultural literacy and they will have to make guesses and assumptions about things the people who are within the culture have a positive and clear understanding of. The third level is called critical literacy which requires more of an in-depth analysis when it finds the real in-depth meaning about the goal of a language. For example the story that showed you about the preacher's stand and the miracle of the people becoming healed is it required okay this requires a lot of understanding and philosophy to analyze the language to really get all of the pieces and put them together to make the point very strongly to show that deaf people are not handicapped it makes a it makes a more philosophical point if you have the in-depth analysis. Secondly it's possible that you can you can see ASL literature and be able to appreciate it but then when you go home you might have a sense that you can learn the things that you saw and be able to produce it yourself and that will give you an opportunity to really feel the pride of the creativity of using your own language to produce it. Now if we want to tie all of this back literature and literacy and how they work together we need to envision a person who is quite literate in ASL what do they look like what kind of characteristics do they have they're a person who can express the language which basically means functional literacy they can express ASL clearly and receive it with understanding but might not have more in-depth knowledge. Now the second point adds a component of education to functional literacy so that they might be able to apply their knowledge to the language and be able to speak about it from a more educated point of view and some of the artists used this type of knowledge to produce some of their creative works. This third point like the poem that's entitled 1880 you know that that's an important 1980 it's an important day in the life of the people there or march of 1988 which is very important now because that's when the deaf president now event occurred and so our when a story is related using things as symbols like the bird or the eagle these these can be used to draw parallels to the culture that a person is coming from. A lot of the themes behind deaf literature shows people talking about how they can succeed and how they can do it like they talk about what life would look like if the majority of the people sitting in an offense audience were deaf and a very small minority in the audience were hearing so they'll use a lot of the literature types of components that are used in other languages in order to create some awareness like for example some of the people who are catching hand shapes that were similar or rhythms that are reproduced a few times and perhaps we'll see new forms develop as well now one of the reasons we gave you several names of people is because now you know that there are people out there who are well known in the deaf community and well known for their work ASL literature means that a person has done a lot of hard work to develop what they do but they don't do it for a camera they do it for a live audience ASL poetry is something that needs to be seen not the artists can't do it in isolation they need to have a sense of sharing with the audience and with the community then we can sit back and talk about what we think that they mean not only on the surface but also on a more deep level someone who works in ASL creative work can be someone who can really inspire awe though someone who can interpret their world in a magical way and produce art that provides enjoyment to the audience sometimes it's a spine-tingling type of reaction that the audience might have or a sense of of connection that's so strong it almost makes one feel like one wants to cry okay i'll turn it back to Dorothy to conclude okay if we go back to the opening we asked you many questions did we answer them all perhaps some of you are more awake or have your eyes opened to some of these maybe your eyes are only open a glimmer maybe we've caused you go to sleep but hopefully we've caused an awakening thank you very much okay thank you very much we're going to go over into room 1215 and then we're going to have a discussion with our two presenters today the next presentation is on march 13th by Doug Bayington at 12 noon an Engel auditorium which is not here it's over on the other side of campus and thank i'd like to thank the two interpreters today Cynthia Johnston and Marie Bernard thank you very much