 Hi, I'm Nat Wilson. Welcome to A Language Landscape. I'll introduce you to five deaf performing artists who, through their use of American Sign Language, are reshaping the field of performing arts. Through stories, satire, performance, dance, and yes, even music, these performers will impart their views of the deaf experience. You may wonder how art and ASL come together. Linguistic research into American Sign Language has not only validated ASL as a language, but also has led to the realization that deaf people, by virtue of their language, are a genuine cultural group. As a result, these deaf artists have developed new styles, forms, and works that reflect their newfound cultural awareness and illustrate the unique visual and dimensional properties of ASL, creating a new kind of theater, ASL theater. You will see some of the forerunners of these developments who will show what can happen when artists from a visual culture use a visual language to create performances. Our first artist is Marybeth Miller. She is a founding member of the National Theater of the Deaf, founder and artistic director of the New York Deaf Theater, and co-author of Hand Talk, the first book to treat sign language in an artistic fashion. Marybeth has continued her sign language play in performances where she's known for her offhand humor. My hands? They're my voice, the heart of my communication. I wanted not only to play with articulation and delivery like any performer, but wanted to develop a piece that would personify the qualities unique to the meeting of sign language. There seemed to be all sorts of possibilities. I came across the idea for the piece Cross Hands, while I was fooling around with a hand twister, spelling a different word with each hand at the same time. The voice could never say two things at the same time. See in sign language we have a passive and a dominant hand. My right hand is dominant and it takes the active role while the left serves as a base. As you can see poor lefty is always a doormat. My hands inherently seem to have their own character traits. My right hand is assertive, amiable and extroverted while like any passive person lefty is more resentful and competitive. Offstage I'm able to keep the piece between the two. I even imagine they're learning to get along, but as soon as I get on stage, it's a fight for the limelight. I'll get you righty. Oh, I'm gonna really lefty. I said cut it out. Lay off. What is your trip? Every time we perform you screw it up. You want to be a star? Okay, you're on your own kiddo. Oh dear, what do I do now? Oh, I know a song. Three blind mice. Okay. Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how? Oh. One more time. Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how? Oh. How? Oh. I give up. I'm sorry. I thought I could do it. Stay righty. I was sleeping. What's wrong? I want to tell you I'm sorry. I guess I can't do it with that. See, I tried to tell you, but no, you miss know it all. Had to do it your way. You always have. I got it. You got it. Okay, good. Maybe now we can get on with the work at hand. Okay, friends. It was fate in the form of two catastrophes that led me to National Theater of the Deaf. First, I should have graduated from Gallaudet College in 1966, but I flunked French, so I had to stay until 1967. The year the first professional deaf theater was formed, National Theater of the Deaf. They had just chosen eight actors for an NBC special and were scouting for four more. About then, several of us from college drove up to New York City for a performance. Not knowing any better, we left our car packed full of stuff parked on the street. When we came back, the car had been completely cleaned out. Furious, I drove like a mad woman back to school. We had just walked in when two hearing men came up and introduced themselves by saying they were from New York City. Well, that's all they took. I launched into such a tirade. I didn't know that they were David Hayes and Jean Lascaux from National Theater of the Deaf until they looked at each other, nodded and ended my tirade by asking if I would come to NTD summer school. It must have been a four star performance. So I headed straight for NTD after graduation. There was a sea of people all competing for those four slots. I never wanted or worked so hard for anything in my life. When the summer came to an end, they chose me as a company member. I couldn't believe it. It's kind of interesting. Being with NTD expanded the scope of my work. All I had ever done was perform for deaf audiences. Now I had to think of hearing audiences as well. I tried to develop pieces that didn't rely on the use of an interpreter or knowledge of sign language. I chose classics that can stand without interpretation like Little Red Riding Hood or familiar items like this next piece, Pinball Machine. Our second performer is Ben Bahan, a linguistic researcher into American Sign Language and vice president of SignUp Publishing Company, which publishes and distributes materials related to deafness. Ben is a storyteller who has adopted traditional tales for quite some time. Here you'll see an excellent example of ASL storytelling in his original tale about an eagle family struggling with difference. Soon to be published, we're fortunate to have Ben perform excerpts from his story Bird of a Different Feather. I've been telling stories for quite some time, not the kind you normally hear. I take traditional stories and adapt them by making the characters deaf and by incorporating deaf experiences. You're about to see excerpts from a story that I created in response to a news item. The article concerned a three-year-old deaf girl whose parents could not accept her deafness. Perhaps their own desire to make her hearing, coupled with the promises of technical wizardry by medical professionals, led them to do a permanent surgical procedure called a cochlear implant. She can never take it out and it doesn't really make her hearing. Even more troubling, this three-year-old girl was powerless and had no choice. Even if the technology worked, what's so horrifying is the complete unwillingness to accept the reality or value of deafness. What they did is comparable to parents subjecting black children to experiments in the uncertain hope of making their kids white. I decided to create a story from her point of view to show the oppression of deaf people by hearing people who attempt to make us more like them at any cost. High on top of Mount Eaglery, Mama and Papa Eagle anxiously await the hatching of their firstborn. Look, dear, the eggs are moving. We'll soon have our little ones. How wonderful. So perfect. Three fine boys. The fourth one hasn't budged. Here it comes, honey. Cure! Heavens! It's not an eagle like us! Mama and Papa Eagle were in great despair over their youngest boy. His body was tiny, and worst of all, his beak came to a sharp little point. Beakle, as he came to be known, simply was not an eagle. But Mama and Papa were good parents and searched for remedies to cure their poor son. All the doctors pronounced the same verdict, surgery. But the eagles couldn't afford such a thing. Mama Eagle took Beakle to one last doctor. Ms. Eagle, he said, I do know a special school for birds like your son, which teaches them how to hunt, think, and act just like an eagle. Though you and I know he will never be truly like us, it's the best thing short of surgery. So Mama Eagle, filled with renewed hope, took Beakle off to live at this residential school. Keep those beaks eagle like brush three, four. Very good class. Now let's try the wingspan stretch and stretch two, three, four, and stretch two, three, four. Look at our son, dear. The philosophy of my school is to teach them to think, act, and hunt like eagles. Here Ms. Winger is leading an exercise to expand their wingspan with enough practice and drill, while someday they may look just like us. Oh, if only three, four. After graduation, Beakle returns home and the family joyfully celebrates. But when Beakle and his brothers go hunting, his prey merely laugh at this small and weak bird pretending to be an eagle. In spite of his perfect hunting techniques, day after day, Beakle returns home empty-handed and full of shame. To lift Beakle's spirits, the family decides to go on an outing to the next mountaintop. Excited to show off his well-practiced wing stretching techniques, Beakle relishes the chance to prove his worth. They begin happily, high in flight, but soon Beakle begins to tire. He can't keep up with his family who fly much higher and faster. Exhausted, he spots a cluster of trees where he might rest and begins his descent into the forbidden lands. What's that sound? Oh, no. It must be singing and it's coming from the tree next to me. Hey, hey. What do you think you guys are doing? Don't you know only naughty birds sing? Who told you that? Well, my mother in the eagle school. Well, they're wrong. It's perfectly natural to sing. Come on, try it. Oh, me? Come on. Beakle poured out his heart in song. Never before had the others heard a song so beautiful. For the first time in his life, Beakle felt he belonged amongst others who were like him. Eagle alert! Eagle alert! Take cover! Beakle was in big trouble. Mama and Papa Eagle were horrified when they found out that Beakle had been so uneagle-like. Grounded for a month, Beakle sat alone, dreaming of the lowlands. Without even knowing, he'd begin to sing, which upset his parents even more. One night, he overheard his parents talking to his brothers. Sons, Mama and Papa said, I'm afraid we failed with Beakle. We've tried everything to make him normal, but he's still not an eagle. There's only one last hope for making Beakle an eagle, and that's surgery. Oh, Beakle. We're so glad you're awake. The surgery went well. I'm proud, son. You took it like a real eagle. I'm Dr. Beaker. This is the moment we've been waiting for. Here's a mirror. Just look at the new you. After his surgery, Beakle still wasn't an eagle. Although disappointed, his family tried to make him feel like one of them, and Beakle tried desperately to fit in. Despite all their efforts, though, Beakle was still different and just didn't belong. So he went back to the lowlands, hoping to sing with birds like himself. But surgery had rendered his song terribly out of tune. To his horror, Beakle realized that the operation which had failed to make him an eagle also had made him different than regular birds. Totally homeless. He flew toward the setting sun in the hope of somehow finding a new home and others like himself. Musign is Rita Corey, Bob Hilterman and Ed Chevy, three performers who formed a troop that has gained international recognition. Their love of music and sign language has led them to combine dance, sign language, and music to make a show that bridges the gap between deaf and hearing audiences. I come from a creative deaf family. My father was one of the founding members of the National Theater of the Deaf, and my mother was a professional flamenco dancer. So with their combined talents, I was inspired to develop my own work. I started signing music when I was 14 years old. Since I could hear music with the help of my hearing aid, but my parents couldn't, I wanted them to be able to appreciate music like I did. My brother, who's also deaf, was involved in music as well. He started his first deaf band back when we were in high school. Remember Chevy? Yes, that's when I first started getting into music. I had just gotten my first bass guitar. When I hit those strings, I knew something was there. So I decided to form my own deaf band. We wrote original material and did our own vocals. In fact, that's how I met Bob. Yeah, I remember we met at Gallaudet College. I played drums with you. You were a good drummer. Thanks. When we met, I had just started to learn sign language. I'm hard of hearing and wear a hearing aid, and mostly I associated with hearing people. But when I got to Gallaudet, I started to learn sign language. As I came to love it and get better at it, I started interpreting music, which I've been doing ever since. That's when we really started working together as a group back in 1971. But it wasn't until 1980 that we formed a professional company. My father came up with a company logo, MuSign, by combining the signs. Music. Sign. MuSign. LMA Lens is another ASL linguistic researcher, but also a poet who deals with language in her works. In the following interview, she will describe her transition from creating poetry in a written form to composing poetry exclusively in ASL. Then she will perform an early written work she has translated into sign language and a later work composed in ASL for which there is no translation. I began to write poetry when I was 12 years old. At the time, I wanted so much to be like other hearing poets, and that meant I had to write in English and of course make my poems rhyme. It wasn't until my senior year at Gallaudet College in the mid-70s that I began to create my poems in sign language. At the time, a whole new attitude of deaf awareness was on the rise. Research was proving that ASL was a language as valid as English and that deaf people are therefore a genuine cultural and minority group. We'd debate for hours over these questions of language and culture. Inevitably, someone would say, but what a shame that deaf people don't have music. Somehow, music, or their perceived lack of it, signified our lack of cultural development. But I was sure we had music. The day I graduated from Gallaudet College, I was on a train going home. Transfixed by the visual rhythm of the passing telephone poles, I remembered curling up in mother's lap during long car rides to stare out at the changing skyline. And I realized that such visual rhythm had always been my music. It dawned on me that this is deaf music. So I wrote a poem in English and years later translated it into sign language. Next, you'll see my performance of eye music. The eye music of the telephone wires with the music sheets with lines that rise and quiver, sway and lower along with the passing of space and time. No ears needed to hear nor any instruments to play. Eyes are the ears and the piano and flute are the wires and the occasional pole is the drum. Here is one bold wandering wire and now here are five dancing high and low in turns with the rhythm of the poles. Five disappearing into one again and then a crowd overlapping quickly and then slowly. So beautiful to the eye and heart. One wonders what happens inside? I had the opportunity to be involved in the early stages of research into American sign language, ASL. I can't tell you how empowering it was to have a conscious understanding of principles which I had only known intuitively. This knowledge along with my study of the structure of English written poetry helped me greatly in the development of my own poetry and ASL. As a result I no longer needed writing to make poetry. At first I concentrated more on form than content. I experimented with handshapes, movement and spatial relationships. Then I placed emphasis on the content as well as the form. In a moment I'll show you a poem never translated in English in which I link style, form and content called wedding poem. It was developed for the wedding of two Christian friends of mine. The style is based on the use of similar handshapes which would be comparable to English alliteration. For example, the handshape for one when combined with different movements are fallen from grace, struggle, pain, bickering and disappointment. The five handshape can say misery, fear, lust, anger, war, contamination and bloodshed. In form and content the poem is built on three icons prevalent in Christianity. The cross, the circle and the triangle to symbolize the meaning of marriage. In its simplest summation this excerpt of wedding poem begins with the crucifixion. Christ's sacrifice preserves God's spirit on earth. The crucifixion becomes a way for the spirit to become earthly bringing hope and joy to the world through everlasting love with God. The metaphor she uses for the bride and bridegroom are two candles burning for the love of God and each other. Their flame burns brighter when they unite as they work towards their larger goal of the union between human and God. The wedding of the bride and bridegroom symbolize the marriage of the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, human and God. There is no language to describe this next man's work. He is to ASL what Steven Spielberg is to special effects. Sam Supala, a filmmaker, ASL linguist and performer, has taken the language of the camera and wed it to the language of American sign language to create live cinematic dazzle. Film has had a tremendous influence on my work and how I use ASL in it. My family is deaf and has their own film production company so I grew up making films. We would discuss making the film, the scene sequences, the angles we were going to use and so forth. All this was described visually in sign language so that I was already seeing it played out live. But the finished film always disappointed me. It looked so different than what I had seen us sign. The film was too limited to real world representation. It just wasn't as rich as what we signed in our living room. In contrast to film, when we developed a scene in ASL, our visual language left more room for the viewer to imagine what was being represented and put the viewer in a more interactive relationship with the performer and the performer more free to imbue the story with personal nuance. It was live. In my performances I try to have the best of both worlds. I have expanded the parameters of ASL to incorporate the eye of the camera and its shifting point of view. While the abstraction of ASL frees me from film's literalness or real world representation. This cinematic technique became my style. As you have seen, the premise of ASL theater is the deaf experience and the power of these performances arises from their artistic expression of deaf culture. At the same time, these performers are exploring the medium and possibilities of their visual language, ASL, in a variety of ways and contexts, from the cinematic and sculptural to the traditional and narrative. What is truly unique about their works is the way they reshape the properties and structure of ASL to create a visual linguistic sculpture, which is also a new and exciting form of art. And this is only a beginning.