 Hello, I'm Matthew Moore. I am the publisher of Deaf Life Magazine. And also, I am a coordinator with Flying Words Project. I want to welcome you here. Before we start, I would like to mention a few things to get us going. First of all, good morning. I am personally not much of a morning person. I'm a little loggy right now, but I'll shake that off. Now, I am supposed to invite Kenny Lerner to the stage to say a few words, but he is not here, so I guess we'll just jump ahead. But I would like to welcome you to this conference, and I want to mention that people have made this conference possible. Karen Christie, Patricia Durer, Laurie Brewer, Kenny Lerner, Miriam Lerner, myself. Well, I don't matter so much. Dorothy Wilkins, Jean Von D. Wilcott. Now, the purpose of this conference is to discuss the idea of ASL literature and what exactly that means and what it's about. We want to have a better definition of it. At this point, we do not have a particular way to define it, so as a group, we're coming together to find a common meaning and definition of the term ASL literature. Does it exist or doesn't it? Throughout this conference, we'll have copy sign interpreters up on the stage, meaning you'll have the presenter and you'll have a copy signer after that presenter has done with their particular information, and when there's a Q&A portion of the presentation so that people in the audience don't have to crane their necks crazily and try to see each other, we will have a copy signer on the stage copying, mirroring that question so that everybody in the audience can see it, and then the presenter can go ahead and address it and give the answer. All right, we'll have three copy signers who will be providing services throughout. Myself, Leslie Greer, and Jackie Shirts. Let's see, is there one more? One, two, three, I guess that's it. The three of us will be providing that service, okay? All right, I am very pleased to be welcoming to the stage our first presenter, Clayton Valley. He performed here last night. Some of you may have seen his show, and today he'll be discussing his work. He is a professor at Gallaudet University in the Department of Linguistics and Interpreting. He's also studying part-time for his PhD in collaboration with the University of Ohio. Please welcome him with me, Clayton Valley. Hello, everybody. So last night I had my performance hat on and now I have to switch hats and go to a presentation track, and that's very difficult for me. The topic I'll be addressing today is approaches in teaching ASL creative arts and poetry. I've been engaged in research and study and analysis about how to teach creative arts and poetry in ASL. This is in regards to my PhD studies that I'm engaged in right now, and so I'd like to give you an overview of what I have found so far. Now in the deaf community, as I've been studying it, I've noticed that there are five interesting forms which have presented themselves to me. There's creative arts, and I'll explain more about the definitions of that as we progress through the presentation. There's something called percussion, percussion sign, and that's rhythm accompanied usually by a drum. And I'll, as I said, be going more into that. There's poetry. Let's see, where is this fourth one? There's storytelling and there's humor. These are five particular art forms that I have seen evidenced in the deaf community, and today the focus of my talk will be specifically on creative arts and poetry. I may mention the other three in passing, but predominantly my talk will be about those first two. I have an overhead, and I'll be talking a little bit about each one of these. What creative arts actually means is an overarching theme, and then go down through the various parts that I want to address. Is this clear? Can you see this okay? Too small? Yeah, if I move the projector back, we can enlarge it. How's that, okay? You can see better? What's the question from up there? Oh, the question from the audience is, will I be disseminating copies of my presentation in terms of the overhead? I wasn't planning to, but I can ask somebody to make some copies and make sure that everybody gets one if they care too. Now, predominantly, we're looking at patterns of handshapes, fives, ones, different handshapes when we talk about the creative art form. Oh, you were having trouble seeing me. So for example, patterns, like ABC stories. You're familiar with ABC stories, right? You've seen those before. I could do it this way. A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W. Excuse me, X, Y, Z. And that described an autopsy, the person being prepared for burial, and then the funeral. Now, I did not create that. I actually took that from a kid in a high school who created it. I borrowed it from that person because it evidenced it so well. But anyway, that gives you an idea of what ABC stories would look like. And then there's something you call number stories. Here's one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. That's one to eleven. Again, you look at me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Now, I know it's really fast, but I remember this one really well because I was introduced to it when I was pretty young. Let's see. I think I was at junior NAD, the junior NAD conference. And I was just so young and green. And I ran into this group of older deaf kids who were just sort of all that. And I walk in and one of them says, hey, look at me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. And of course I didn't get it. I had never seen anything like that before. And they said, hey, and they did it again. And they did this over and over and over again until I finally got it. And I realized, oh, this whole thing is the numbers one to eleven, but it looks like they're calling me on the carpet about something. But I never forgot it. Now, there are some creative art forms in ASL using just one hand shape. Let's see here. Yes. Like MGA Banvenu, she had a story on a tape that I saw. And I thought it was a perfect example. Ladies and gentlemen, dressed very elegantly, talking, and then they look up. There's a fire. Everybody tries to get out in a mad dash and they all unfortunately die. That was all in five hand shape. Man, woman, clothes, fancy, talking, mingling, looking up, seeing a fire. Everybody's scrambling to get out, but unfortunately they trample each other and they all die. One hand shape throughout. And then there are word stories or word utterances. And you've seen these around. You've seen golf. That's the most famous one. G with an O, L, F. G is the T. O is the ball. L is the club. And F is when the ball is hit. G, O, L, F. The ball goes into the distance. Or somebody in the audience is saying something. Oh, they have an even clearer version of it. Okay, I like your version better. You make the G like this. It's the T. The O goes on top of it. Right, right. G, O, L, F. Golf. What's the other one? Oh, there's leaf. There's a tree and then L. How's it go? L, E, A, F. The leaf lands on the ground. L, E, A, F. Or leaf. And there's waterfall. There's all sorts of them. That's right. There's reflection where both hands spell reflection as if one's a reflection of the other. Lots of variations on the theme. Coffee. C, O. I don't think I can even do this one. I forgot how to do it. C, O, F, F, E, E. Right. Something like that. Coffee. So you can see that kind of word play going on. Then there's finger spelled name stories or jokes. Like my name, Vali, V-A-L-L-I. I look down. I got an A in exam. Wow, I'm all that. I'm pretty happy about that. And then I go, oh, it's all about me. V, A, L, L, I, Vali. So you look at the person. And you try to evoke some sort of personal characteristic about them by taking the letters of their name, first or last name, and then creating sort of a sign language play about it. It can either be something complimentary or something more critical. So you get the idea. That's creative arts. And all of the focus is on the hands. And of course, body language and facial expression is important, but the real artistry is taking place on the hands themselves and the signs that are chosen. Now, you're probably familiar with the idea of deaf songs or deaf chants, deaf song. Songs and deafness don't necessarily seem to go together in that separate discussion, but I've gone to workshops. And there was one person who suggested the idea of percussion, meaning that there's a forced beat. There's a sound that's accompanying the sounds, the signs at the same time. And I like that word percussion. I think it's very strong and it makes sense. There are different sorts of drums, whatever configuration of drumming you may be using. And you feel that resonance in your sternum. You feel that at the same time that the signs are being ballistically produced. It was really popular back in the day at Gallaudet. You might be familiar with the bison cheer or the bison chant. And I was never any good at it. I don't know it very well, but I've seen it. And I've seen people do it really well. Bison, bison, fight, fight, fight, something like that. But with a drum accompanying at the same time. And it's wonderful, really. You can feel it. It's very exciting. You feel the boom, boom, and it resonates through your whole being. It seems like there are occasional recurrences and resurgence of that art form. But I hope that it has a rejuvenation of that technique because I think there's a lot of variations you can do with it. And I do see that beginning to proliferate again. Now in Canada, there's a woman named Angela Stradie. I've seen her work. I'll try to copy a little bit of what she was talking about. She was saying something about, let's see, hail the flag. Well, and it goes along with the drum, remember. So hail the flag. Colors of white and red. And there's clapping in between along with a beat. If you're deaf and you feel frustrated, frustrated. No, wait, what is it? Frustrated, frustrated, I think. Oppressed, oppressed. Put down, put down. Take heart, be brave. What is it? Fight, fight, cooperate, cooperate, cooperation, cooperation. I think that's it. From the four corners of the land, we looked to each other and know that deaf can. Something like that. I know that was a little awkward. But along with a drum beat, it is wonderful. And the signs are produced in different ways. If you were going to say cooperation, you would sign it like this in just everyday parlance. But there's a swinging movement to it. It changes the movement of the sign when it goes along with a drum beat. Or the idea of oppression or being put down. The regular form would just be this right in front of your body way. But this makes you lean back. And it's always an account of three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And so the beat actually pushes the signs in a particular direction. And I think that it's really a different form, a different way of doing it that's quite exciting. Now, rhythm and meter. One, two, one, two, three with a drum. It can be two beats, it can be three beats. Or sometimes it can alternate. One, two, one, two, three, or one. There's lots of different ways to do it. And then there's the movements of the sign themselves. Like I said, the sign cooperation changed to a swinging kind of movement. It was not produced in the regular prosaic way. Sometimes the audience claps along so they feel part of it and they accompany the sign. Sometimes the audience is not supposed to do that. They're just supposed to feel it and watch. So it's interesting. There are different elements in that in this particular art form. But it's not something that I have looked at in depth. I'm just beginning my research into that particular area. Now the deaf community is quite famous for its storytelling. And I've seen four different sorts of stories. There's personal narratives, personal experiences that people tell, and they are so artful in the telling sometimes. People are so good at it. Somebody be telling a story and of course with repetition over and over again, they augment it and they exaggerate. And then you're really able to see the art inside as it grows as a person tells it more and more. It could be about their own experiences that they're recounting. Then there are written stories that a person performs almost the same as when they were written, just exactly the same, from a written story. Somebody in the audience is jumping ahead saying you mean translation? Nope, that's the next category. Then there are translations, translations of stories. And by that I mean, well a good example is the three little pigs. You know, in that story the wolf knocks on the door of the pig. That's how it's written. But if you're going to make it a deaf story, you would have somebody ring the bell and a light would flash. So you could retell the story so that it fits better for a deaf audience. You could have TTYs, flashing lights, behaviors, and sensibilities that deaf people would exhibit. So you're adapting the story or translating it. And then there are original stories that are created by the storyteller themselves that are original. You know the story of Ieth? You're familiar with Ieth? That's one that was created by Sam Sopala. So that wasn't from somebody else's pen. He created that one. And he'll be performing that, I think he's performing tonight, right? So maybe he'll give a show and, sorry, let me say that again. Maybe he'll perform Ieth for you tonight. I've only scratched the surface of looking at storytelling in a more in-depth way. That's more Sam's field. He is the storytelling guy. That's the field that he's most involved with. Now for my research into poetry. And I have several elements that I've found that I like to talk about from workshops I've been in, things I've been exposed to from other people and ideas that I've gathered. Now poetry does have rhyme within it. There's repetition of handshapes, and that creates rhyme in ASL poetry. Now I performed last night, and you may have noticed when I did dandelion that I used this handshape over and over again to show the man and also the dandelion puff. I used it again and again, and I actually created an internal rhyme scheme. And then there's cycles or different movements that recur. You could look at the movement itself, and that creates a sort of a rhyme. Like Ella May Lentz's poem that she's shown before, where there's time, continue, cycles, circles, orbits, rotations. So the repetitive motion of the circle created a rhyme. Repeating facial expressions over and over can also create a certain kind of rhyme and also repeating certain placements in space can create rhyme. So there's several different ways that ASL poetry exhibits the corollary to spoken language rhyme, but in ASL. Now one thing that you might change too is the way you produce a sign in space. I was signing my poem, and the sign grass goes up on your chin actually, but I didn't like that. I didn't feel that it fit the poem to have the sign grass so close to my face, so I created a sign for grass that was more central to my body, and that's a choice a poet can make. Now if I was going to show blowing a dandelion, you would show picking it and blowing it, but I didn't feel that that was dramatic enough, so I created another sign to show that puff of dandelion seedlings at the tip of the stem on my hand. So you will make these sorts of determinations and creative choices depending on the flow of your poem. Classifiers. Pretty much everybody's familiar with the idea of classifiers, and poetry relies quite heavily on them to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the poem, of course, but classifiers are a pretty integral part of most ASL poems. Transformations of one sign to another one. If you've seen the poem by Debbie Rennie, she's a quite famous poem that she performs where she throws a card into the air and as it slowly falls to the ground, when it reaches the ground, it turns over and becomes the sign death. So the classifier B is a card, and then at the bottom of the movement, it turns over which creates the sign to die or death, which is amazing. It's the same sign, but it creates two different meanings. As it flows through space, it transforms into a different sign and therefore a different feeling for the poem. Now, Markedness. That means that you notice something that just seems a little strange and out of the ordinary, something you wouldn't see in everyday parlance. Something's marked. It's uncommon the way it's produced. So the handshape I showed you before with a stem with a dandelion seed pod on top of it, that's not a normal sign. It's a marked sign, a markedly different sign. Patrick Grable was doing his poem reflection the other day. Five, four, three, two, one, and then the smoke from the rocket as it clears the launch pad. Then what was it? He was looking back in time, then the back of the head of the president blew off and created this handshape. So he took a handshape, put it behind his head, and it was marked in a way. It's something out of the ordinary. It broke the normal rules of production and movement and draws attention to itself. Eye gaze would refer to where your eyes go when you're performing the poem. With storytelling, you can either look directly at the audience or you would look around you within the world of the poem, and it can go either way, either engaging the audience looking straight out at them or being completely subsumed within the world of the poem that you're performing. It just depends on what sort of thing you're performing at the time. There's also personification taking on the character, such as becoming the flower in the poem I performed last night. I took on the flower's character. I didn't show it apart from myself. I personified it as if the flower was a human or the human was a flower. Like the teddy bear poem, when I became the teddy bear and said, I'm sorry, it's an inanimate object that becomes human. It's personified. There's also the idea to address a literal versus figurative. Now, literal is when something is overt or really happening and figurative is some sort of symbolic meaning that underlies it. Literal means something that's really happening in real life. Figurative is just a particular construct that's opposite of literal and it's used for a dramatic effect. Almost like metaphor. You see something on the outside of something, but what's hidden behind it could be the figurative meaning that you're trying to get across. And symbolism, of course, is quite important. The son represents the father in the snowflake poem and the snowflake represented the child in that poem. And so together, when you present both of those elements, you understand what the underlying meaning is. Then there's the use of irony. Remember in that poem, when the snowflake lands on top of the rest of the snow, it's supposed to be a positive thing, but my face belies that. Or when the father says one sentence, he said one sentence, and the son says one expression, although the signs looked like it was positive, I was showing that the opposite was actually true and that was ironic and not so great. There's also the idea of framing that I'd like to address. When you look at a poem, a beginning frame, a middle frame and an end frame, different scenarios within it, or perhaps a whole poem can take place in just one frame. Perhaps there could be four different frames in space and time that you're presenting. You can pull them up into different sorts of scenes. Somebody over in the audience is saying, for example, the cave, my poem, the cave. How many frames do you think that had? This person's saying that the cave takes place in just one frame. Somebody else is saying maybe like seven or eight. You're saying the wires, the cochlear implant. That bears some time for analysis. I don't really have time to go into it right now, but I'd have to really look at and determine how many frames are in that poem. The idea of framing is very important when you're counting how many different scenarios are presented in each poem. I've also have noticed that most poets, most ASL poets stand in one place rooted to the spot. Now, they may change their body alignment or they move back and forth just a little bit, but primarily they stay in one place because the rhythm would be confounded and confused by somebody walking back and forth. It's hard to catch the rhythm of the language when the body movement is somehow overlying that, and we need to discuss this more because some people disagree with this particular idea, but I find that it's very important to stay in one place to perform a poem. I just want to make sure that you understand that this is still very much up for discussion and has not been agreed upon by most people. There's a question over here. I'm thinking that storytelling lends itself more to people walking back and forth on a stage because when somebody's performing and being much more dramatic, they might travel a little bit more, but poems tend to stay in one place, so the art forms determine that, I think. Yes, I would agree. That's true for storytelling. People sometimes do travel a little bit more, but sometimes people sit on the edge of a stage or on a chair and tell a story and don't move at all. Poetry, most people tend to stand, it seems to me. Most seem to stay in one place for a greater impact, I agree. So you get the idea of what I'm seeing here. I'm looking at all the different constructs and elements that I noticed in the deaf community in terms of creative arts and poetry. These are various art forms that I've remarked upon, and you can compare these with regular conversation in your everyday life, and you'll notice that they're quite different, of course, in conversation you're not going to be doing all of these different sorts of things. There's something called citation form, CF, and you could say that's a sign as it's shown in its dictionary form. If you look up in the dictionary and you see the sign look, L-O-O-K, it'll show you a person looking off into the distance performing that sign. That's the citation form, and there's only one. When in actuality we use that sign and we perform that sign in many different ways, looking up and down, looking out in space, making two people look at each other, all the different permutations of how you would actually sign the sign look. But in the dictionary there's just a frozen form of how it should be done one way. In prose there's different ways of creating signs, and then in art forms there's yet another way of showing signs, and so it's important to note that there are three different ways to perform a sign even though there's only one citation form. Now who are the best ASL signers? We already know it's kids who've grown up with deaf families, they've learned from their elders, they've learned from peer groups by going to the schools for the deaf or the deaf clubs or wherever they meet other deaf people, and that's how they grow those particular skills of being adept ASL signers. But I would like to ask the question, who are the signers who are extremely creative, and who I would say are sign athletes in a sense, like mental athletes. So you know that when somebody's athletic, they're described as athletic, that means they're really adept at sports, good at soccer, volleyball, track, you know, working on the body. But what about the corollary of the mind being athletic? Where do we exercise those creative ASL techniques and make a mind or ASL athlete mentally? What are the creative forms and arts and artistry? Generally it's found in the dorms of the schools for the deaf or the deaf clubs, and in public performances that people perform where people can then see it demonstrated for them. But in the schools, there doesn't seem to be much happening at all today. Where is that happening? I proposed to you that it's not happening at all. It is out in the community, but it's not in the schools. That's where I intend to focus my energies, is to create that more in the school setting. There are several reasons why there is a dearth of this. Sign language has been pushed to the side in favor of oralism at the schools for the deaf or where deaf children are being educated. The artificial sign system such as C sign or other things like that that are created, which are still out and about, healthy and well in the schools for the deaf, something called contact sign systems where the school sometimes talks, sometimes signs, and then both of those languages infiltrate each other. That's ubiquitous as well. There are bilingual schools, but there are very few and far between. Now what this would mean is something like you can see at the Learning Center in Boston, south of Boston in Framingham, Massachusetts. There's a program there, and what they do with that approach is they keep English and ASL quite separate. The moment you enter that school, you turn your voice off. And all day long, voices are off, and it's only ASL every moment of the day. And even if two people, hearing people, are alone in a room together, they're expected to use ASL without their voices. And it's quite an interesting approach. Indiana School for the Deaf is now beginning to initiate that as well. Fremont School for the Deaf is also using it. So it seems like it's starting to occur here and there. More and more schools may be using it, but I'm just not aware of it. Kendall School, somebody said MSSD is using it. Ohio School for the Deaf also is using it. So it seems like that approach is gaining a little bit more traction. Natural Sign Language, where's that? And what that means is that from the moment a baby is determined to be Deaf, they are signed to. But that doesn't happen very much, not yet. As we know, 90% of Deaf kids are born to hearing families. Only 10% have Deaf families. So if a hearing couple has a baby and they discover it's Deaf, they spend an amount of time trying to figure out what kind of program to put it in and only expose it to sign language much later. And they've lost all that time and window of opportunity right off the get-go to give them natural sign language right away. So in the classroom, there's problems with the different sorts of sign systems that are being presented to these kids. And all this happens the expense of any sort of artistry or art forms being taught. The teachers, for the most part, are not aware of the art form of ASL. And if they are, they don't know how to teach it. And so any sort of creative artistry in language is through English. And that's what they're pumbling the kids with is English. English poetry and English literature. So I've decided what I want to do is look specifically at how to engender creative arts in ASL to school children. Now, the first time I tried this, I went to the Stark School in Delaware. It's a C program signed exact to English. The whole school is. It's all deaf. And it's a day program, so the kids go home to their parents every day. There's a few who stay for the weekends and the doors, but for the most part, it's kids who are day school students. So I was invited to go for a residency there. Now, C sign, I was a little intimidated. I don't really get it, but I thought, well, let's see how this goes. So I went. And boy, in the beginning, it was really rough. They were doing all of these different signs that I was not familiar with. But when they saw me start to sign, they just mopped me. They came right around and thronged me and I had to stay them down a little bit. I started to introduce some creative arts to them. And I did that one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven thing that I had met when I was a kid. And they just went crazy. They were so excited. And these kids were so creative. And I'm telling you, they had it. They have it within them. You could not believe it. It sent shivers up my spine. It did not matter that the prevailing form of communication in the school was C sign. They had ASL arts in them. And the teachers who were witnessing all this could not believe what they saw. They came up and asked me what to do to help fan this flame. And I said, they've got it within them. Do what you can. After I left, the whole school just went into bedlam. The principal decided that everybody had to turn off their voices and wanted to change their whole curriculum. And actually the principal was then fired. This was unintentional. I did not mean to turn everything topsy-turvy by my visit. But it's what happened. So then, oh, there's a question. The question is, what happened after that? Did the school stay voiced off and go to ASL, even though the principal had been fired? My understanding is the school went back to the way it had been before. Yeah, I haven't heard anything much lately about it, my assumption is they went back. I begged them to please take some films of the kids, try to create things with whatever they were trying to do, but they didn't bother even returning my correspondence and I haven't seen anything about what's going on there. And the question is, was the poem last night that you did, Lone Sturdy Tree, was that about that school? No, that was about another school, some other work I was doing someplace else. So I really learned something from that experience. These kids had this within them. It was innate. So I went to the Kentucky School for the Deaf next. Now they did use ASL at this school, but they didn't really have much training or much infusion of arts. The kids who were from Deaf families already had that, already knew how to create some things. Most of the other Deaf kids from hearing families didn't have that in their lexicon or in their repertoire unless they picked up a little something from the other kids with Deaf parents. But I was invited to do a one week residency there and the same sort of excitement was prevailing with all these kids. They were so excited. At the end of the week I was completely depleted, oh my goodness, it was just such a great experience. And again, they had that within them too. Then I went to Fanwood School, same exact situation, just so much excitement and so much infusion of energy. Now what's interesting is that I've noticed that most of the schools for the Deaf that I've gone to is that the campuses are configured so that the junior high school and the upper grades are on one side of campus and the elementary schools are on the other and there's like a line of demarcation between these two areas. And it seems like they've always been that way. So I was hired to work with the junior high school kids and I assumed that during lunchtime or recess that these kids would mingle but the age groups are kept quite separate. I went to the school for the Deaf to the junior high school at Fanwood and I was teaching there. Some teachers over in the elementary side got wind of the fact that I was there and they wanted me to come and teach those kids too. Work with the younger kids. I feel great today here, standing here, talking about ASL poetry. But do you know why I'm here? I'm not here specifically because of this conference. I am standing here. Well, let me go back in time. I was born hearing and when I was a three-year-old kid I became ill with spinal meningitis and that's why I became Deaf. When I got older I was put into an oral school, an oral program, Clark School for the Deaf. Everybody's sitting there aghast. You can't believe it, right? But I'm not fooling. That's really where I went was Clark. I did not learn sign language until I was 19 years old. And if you're wondering where I learned sign language it is right here, like literally right here. Right there in this theater on that spot. I was in a play called The Tempest and I played a character named Caliban. Half man, half animal. And the signing was very awkward. The director told me, just keep it like that. For three months let me make all kinds of mistakes. Like if I was signing King, I would sign it backwards. Everything I did wrong, the director kept saying, great, just keep doing it exactly like that. Patrick Grable was in this play with me. He said, yep, yep, stay just like you are. And I promise after this play I will teach you how to sign right. So I learned from him. I learned from actors. I learned from people who had deaf parents. And I have been in love with American sign language ever since. So today, the fact that I'm talking about ASL, when I look back to where I began, I thought, how could I even open a talk like this? And I think maybe the best way is to start out with a poem. This poem is called, Einstein under an apple tree, an air puffed tent, unzipped with knowledge, releasing stars of red, blue, white, planets and galaxies, supernovas and quasars, moons play tag. With stars twinkling, stars shooting earth, a breathing ball of clouds coming down through clouds over a timberline forests of maple and spruce, an air puffed tent and Einstein with a Newtonian mind under an apple tree. Crunch juices of molten flames singe his hair. There is no water. He leaps up and jackknifing down, swims through rocks and surfacing with a grass to pay, climbing out under an apple tree. The crunch startles a deer. Unknown noises in the forest, leaping, hooves, over boulders, over fallen timber as he enters a clearing, a sharp shooter's bullet pierces towards the enemy as he falls in a pool of grass. Soldiers of gray, Confederates, charge soldiers of blue. Charging lines come together as drummers drum. Hooves fly, sabers slash, fists fly and cannibals decorate the air with fallen bodies, the white-tailed deer. He purdles over a Johnny rebel, then races past the dying that fall like timber. With a great leap, he glides past these men of war. A raised hoof snaps a twig, startling Einstein under the apple tree, gazing up through leaves of trees over timber-lined forests to a breathing ball of dust. Stars twinkling, stars shooting. Thank you. Thank you. Now I just want to let you know that I did not create this poem alone. Kenny Lerner and I are a team and quite often we will stay up all night long creating things, having a good time and the main goal is that we're playing with language and that's what I want to talk with you about today, the concept of playing with language, why it's important, how important it is. Now I have gone to a lot of different schools, mainstream schools, colleges, everywhere, and if a student wants to take ASL for credit, they're usually told it won't count as an official language on their transcript because they don't think it has literary value at an administrative level. And they'll cite French and Spanish and German that there's literary canon for each of those languages and they don't think ASL does. But I'm here to tell you ASL does have poetry, it does have storytelling, it has theater, it has every single literary element that any other language has, but hegemonically nobody knows this and it's our duty to educate them. So what are we to do as deaf people? What are we to do? We have to play with language and create, challenge yourself, play with your own language. Spoken language literature creation didn't come out of nowhere, it came from years of experimentation and that's why library shelves are filled with examples of it. Library of Congress has multitudes of shelves full of literature in different languages, spoken languages, but very little of it in ASL. And we need to show that we have the energy, the trajectory and we have the ability to create just as much. A few months ago, I took a theatrical workshop with some other deaf people and we had a hearing instructor and he said, okay, now let's be honest, you guys are all friends, right? Now, just imagine, if you were a doctor, you put on your gloves and you're going to perform an operation, you slice open the patient and you reach in and you get out all the stuff that you're supposed to be getting out and you're all done, take off the gloves and you're all done with work and you go to a bar to kind of decompress. Okay, it's the same thing in acting. Now, you two are friends, right? I'm going to give you each a script and you're supposed to be really mad at each other, you're supposed to have to despise each other, okay? And remember, this is the work. Remember, this is the work, you're supposed to just pretend that you're mad at each other later, you're going to be at a bar and everything's going to be fine, right? Okay, so the two people went up on stage, I read their scripts, they're both deaf. Okay, remember, they read the scripts, put the scripts down and the instructor says, okay, go ahead. You stole my money, one person said. I did not, the other one said. And that was it. And the instructor said, I'm not feeling it, guys. Okay, hold on, let's try this again. You are mad with him, right? And the guy said, but he's my friend, you know? The instructor says, no, just ball him out, give him what for, really yell at him because you're going to go to the bar afterwards, you're going to have a really good time and say, ha, ha, wasn't that fun that I yelled at you, right? So don't worry, this isn't personal. Okay, okay, all right, let's see. Take two. You stole my money, he said. I did not, the other guy said. And so after repetition of like many, many, many times, it still wasn't getting much of anywhere because the person, the people didn't really have it authentically within them. But after a few weeks of this particular workshop, the scripts were given out again. And the instructor said, go ahead and translate this into ASL, the English, take it in ASL. And somebody said, how would you say this? Somebody else said, no, that's not how you would sign it in ASL. And they started really going back and forth and getting really activated, just talking about their own language. And the instructor said, wait a minute, stop. Everybody stop what they were doing. Look what you're doing. Are you really mad at your friend there? No, we're just like having a friendly disagreement about the language. And he said, yes, that whole wrangling back and forth and that really activated discussion you're having, that's what I want you to bring to your acting, that same kind of feeling. So it was such a great suggestion because deaf people love talking about their language. They love it. They do ABC stories. They go one to 10 stories. They have group activities and stuff with language. It's amazing. There's so many variations. And I've gone to so many different places and met with so many different people. Like for one instance, I'll say, what's the sign for favorite? And somebody will say, oh, you do this sign. Somebody else does that sign. So that shows that there's energy in the language and energy in the way people want to play with the language out there. It just needs to be capitalized upon. Nobody's ever thought about how to think about the language. And you don't really need to. You just take it and you do it. And this is something that we need to inculcate and little children. We need to teach little kids to be aware of their language. They're always taught to be so aware of English, but we need to give them some real deliberate ways to work with ASL so that they can capitalize on that creativity. And then challenge them. The more they come up with, the more you move the bar. And as they get older and older, you're growing that skill within them. And then that Library of Congress I talked about before will have shelves just as full of literature and canon as spoken languages do. That's what I think. Yay, everybody's clapping. Kenny's clapping, too. All right. Now what I want to talk with you about are the techniques that Kenny and I employ in our work. Techniques are fun because they serve as tools and they're tools that make us think. And if you can give these tools to kids to think and play with, then they, too, can grow that particular art form. And, again, I want to underscore that it's really important for us to be doing this. We all are aware of the importance of facial grammar. Eyes, nose, lips, mouth, cheeks, if you want to show something really far away, like this, squinting or really close up, or somebody who's extremely snooty with their nose up in the air. Or someone who's getting their nose punched in. Mouths can be used in so many different ways, such as this sort of judgmental, ooh, look at her, can you believe that? I can't believe what I see. Or astonishment or disgust. Cheeks are used in different ways, like machine gun firing or helicopter blades chopping or wind smoothly flowing through the air. And there's even more when you consider all the different aspects of body parts that you can use and add to the facial expression. Life is very exciting. You wouldn't say I went home for the weekend. You would explain it with a lot more force and a lot more drama. You catching up to me, Kenny? Wonderful. Up, you need something here. Take this. Classifiers. Now, everybody's aware of classifiers. They're used to describe things and we love classifiers like all the different bobbles and things and different elements on dress, fancy clothing, all the different parts that you could show on somebody's eyes. There are earrings. Every element that somebody could be wearing could be described with a classifier. Or environmental things. Clouds, swirling, sending down lightning bolts, buckets of rain, trees falling over, a flood, a tumultuous flood that's destroying a village. All different ways you can use classifiers. How did you interpret that, Kenny? He's saying, I'm interpreting for you, Kenny. I'm showing them what you look like. You're saying, I started talking and I said clouds and fire and thunderbolts and then raindrops and then a flood and oh, damn it, he got every bit. Got every bit of it. Always good to challenge each other. But body language is something I want to talk about. It shows somebody big, somebody small. Here I am, kind of John Wayne kind of guy. Okay, come on over here. Who, me? Me? You want me? Me? You're looking for me? Okay. Give me your money. Oh, yep, sure. I got to hear somewhere. Yep, uh-huh. And then the mean guy picks up the little guy who's hung up in the air, lets him go and he falls down to the ground again. Notice the eye gaze. Top to bottom, the big guy looking down, the little guy looking up. The other side, not even using the eye gaze, but just picking him up by the top of the head. Hello, hello. And then dropping him to the ground. Again, that eye gaze is really important to determine the spatial relationship and the power relationship. Somebody on a motorcycle. They have a passenger on the back. How do they communicate? Driver says, hey, rider says what? Do I turn left? No, you turn right. I think we turn right, so he turns left and she goes right. So many different ways to use body language. So we talked about classifiers, faces, bodies, all these different techniques. Hand shapes. Hand shape rhymes specifically. You know, when spoken language poets write, they have the last word of each sentence. Rhyme. Or have different sorts of rhyme schemes and we can do the same thing. So the B-hand shape. I'm walking. I approach a house. Open the door. Enter a corridor. As I walk down the hall, my heart is beating. A bat flies by. Scares me and my heart beats even faster. There's a portrait of Napoleon looking down at me from the wall. I keep walking and then the floor starts shaking. A trap door opens. I fall down a chute, down into water. I go down below the surface of the water. That's all a B-hand shape. That is a hand shape rhyme. Did you notice in the Einstein poem just now that I created that there were some hand shape rhymes? Did you notice some of them? What do you think? Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't even thought about that. Einstein's hair and his eyebrows and his mustache, they were all bent for hand shape. What other did you notice? Anything else you noticed? The hallway corridor. Oh no, that was what I just showed you. I'm talking about the Einstein Under the Apple Tree poem that I performed a few minutes ago. What else did you see? Oh, the stars coming out? Stars shining? Or the stars flying out? Oh, okay. I see that you saw some subtle things, but I'm looking for the more overt examples. Those were very subtle, but the ones that were really, really clear examples. Apple on his head, no. I mean, I guess you could say it was a sea. The apple falls and then he takes a bite out of it. That's seas, but I want something even more, more obvious. You got it, A's. Show me what they were. Right, that's right. That person got it, A's. Here was a rhyme. So remember the flag? The armies are charging. They're both holding A's. Somebody is hitting a drum. Those are with A's. The horses hooves are A's. The sabers slashing are A's. The fists flying are A's. Remember sabers slashing, fists flying. Those are all A's. So that's handshake rhyme. Poetry means that there's hidden technique that you don't always see upon the first glance. You have to watch it several times. Sometimes you'll watch something over and over again and you'll always catch more. It's a big headache for linguists, right, because they're studying these things and they watch it and think they've notated everything and then they watch it again and find even more to add to their list. That's the first time. Where's Clayton Valley? I think he'll corroborate what I'm saying. Is that right, Valley, right? He says, yep. Right? You watch it over and over again? Yep, always, forever. That's a good thing, right? I also like to talk about transformation. So you have two places. One on my right and one on my left. So I could tell a story over here and then I can go over to the other area and tell a different story. Maybe I want both these stories to be in the same place and take place at the same time, not at separate times. And the way I can go about doing this is by showing the example of four different elements, maybe the sun, a bird, a butterfly, and a farmer. Watch how this happens. There's a bird flying up towards the sun, swooping down. Now the sign for bird becomes butterfly. The butterfly is flying through grain over to a farmer who's digging in his patch and then the butterfly lands in his hair and he baths it away. Wipes the sweat from his brow. Okay, did you notice that? There was one movement down from one place to another. It takes place in a certain time-skiing. Now, my absolute favorite thing to show you is the butterfly. My absolute favorite thing to show you is going to come next. I don't like football. Let me preface it by saying that. Here's a football player, quarterback, hunch, hike, hike, hike. Sends it down the field. There's the running back. Catches it. He has lots of other football players that are falling over him, but he makes it to the end zone and he spikes it and then goes into his victory dance. Now, I have another thing I want to talk to you about, but maybe you can figure out but maybe that'll be part of the challenge of today's presentation. Here's a little snippet of a poem. A boy is reading a newspaper and then you can see what it is he's looking at. So he... Now, this is at night time I want to say and he's supposed to be asleep, he's supposed to be in bed, but he's reading under the covers with a flashlight so his parents don't know. So he opens up the newspaper, turns on his flashlight and in the beam of the flashlight he sees a picture and then we see the picture and he's in the picture and it's Nixon doing the victory sign. Then he shows that picture going back onto the page and he turns off the flashlight and reacts to the picture he just saw. Okay? So it's sort of a backwards and forwards movement of showing it, going into his mind and becoming part of the picture and then putting it back into its original place on the newspaper. So we do that quite often and the challenge is what do we call it? Favorite, favorite, favorite. How do other people sign favorite? Favorite. There's another one. How do you sign favorite? What's that? F to V? Oh, F to V? Oh, I've never seen that before. Oh, instead of spelling out favorite, it's F-A-V, but it kind of truncates the word. Oh, that's cool. So see, everybody's talking about language, right? All I had to do was ask you one question when there we are off to the races. But anyway, cinematic techniques. You know how there are different ways that you can show frames and spaces and movement and films. Kenny and I love going to the movies. We go to the movies and we eat our popcorn and then after a while we just throw the popcorn away and we start looking at the techniques, the angles, different ways that film language speaks to us and whether we could replicate it or not. Suppose you have two people. You could just have a one-shot back and forth showing each person talking. An army cadet is training a dog for duty in the war and he's training him to attack a padded arm so that someday he'll attack an unpadded arm. And so he goes back and forth between showing the soldier and the dog. Back and forth from the different perspectives of showing each player in that scene. Kenny, I need you up here to help me with this part. Okay, we're going to show you a little bit of baseball. Kenny's the radio. He's had a big influence on me about falling in love with baseball. Move back, move back, move back, move back. Okay, good, right there. Nope, nope, right there. Over, there, right. Beautiful. Okay, you're going to throw to me. Right? On the batter, you're the pitcher. Whoa. Strike. Okay, that's pretty normal, right? But now we're going to change the point of view of this scene. We're going to look straight out to the audience, right? Let's try this. I'm the catcher. Oh, no, wait. You're the catcher. I'm the pitcher. No, you're not supposed to talk dirty. Be careful. This ball's dirty. I want another one. So you see that we broke the rules, but rules are for breaking, right? Because then you can be even more creative if you know the rule and then you break it. Thank you, Kenny. Oops, sorry, I do need you back up here again. Oh, always torturing him. Serge and Johanna, could you come up here too, please? You don't need me. Oh, you're right. Sorry, go back. Oops. Yeah, do you remember the part about the train and the smokestack of the train and the train moving? Hold on one second. I think I need Serge to interpret for me so I understand what it is we're doing. And Serge says, remember last night? It's the train scene. Oh, you mean when it's moving? Yeah, you know, and the smoke from the smokestack on the train and all that. Okay, I got it. I think I got it. With the trees and the telephone poles and all that. Right. So let me explain to them what's going to happen here. So you know how there's a panning shot in a film? It shows a long scene from far away. So this is a train on the tracks traveling at night and two people in one of the cars. That's the train moving past a forest. There's the smokestack. There's the train tracks moving below and the people in the car again to show the idea of time moving. The sun has gone down. The moon has gone down. It's getting dark. The tracks, the poles of wires moving back and the two people in the car exhausted again. Train stops and everybody reacts. Okay, thank you. How much time do we have left? Five minutes. I hate conferences. Okay, let me try to wrap up as fast as I can. I want to talk about the concept of speed because speed can really heighten emotion if you speed things up or slow them down. For example, this is normal speed. Knock, knock, knock. The door opens. FBI against the wall turns the guy against the wall and apprehends him. Okay, but you could change it to be something like this. Knock, knock, knock. Door opens. FBI against the wall. The guy is dragged and then quickly put against the wall, but then in slow motion he reacts as he bashes against the wall. He's slowly turned around and then in normal motion his hands are put behind him. In slow motion he reacts to his hands being put behind him. In slow motion he bashes against the wall. So it alternates. I think I have to stop at this point for some questions because time is a waste in. I'm so sorry we don't have a lot more time, but if you have any questions, I'm ready. Questions from anyone? Yes, something back there. So do you think did you think of all these techniques? Do they come up by accident or how do you use them and how do they come about? That's a great question. We do challenge ourselves to come up with different tools and techniques, suppose we have some great, very cool technique that we want to use. If we try to force it into an idea that we have, generally it doesn't work that way. It's no good to come up with an idea to try to force it into a technique. Sometimes it can work, but not quite often. Usually what happens is we come up with these ideas and we just sort of put them aside. It's as if we have a filing cabinet full of them. Then we have some sort of idea that we're working on. And then we take something that we have that might be a good technique and we try several different ones until the right one works. Kenny and I might think of some super cool thing that we really want to use, but we'll have that and then we'll bookend it with some ideas. But the ideas work better together without some super cool thing hanging them together. But it's great to work in this particular way and just never give up. We keep doing it all the time. Somebody in the back? Yeah, let's hear it. Yep, yep, what is it? You've got one? The name of the technique that I was showing before? That I didn't have a name for? No? No? We were talking about when I was looking at the newspaper and then I had it in front of me. I sort of go into it and then I put it back down again. What did you think? VV? I don't think it's VV. VV? Well, can you copy that please? So, VV, visual, what's that second word? V, vernacular. Visual vernacular, right? Okay. That's when you create different characters and you're standing in one particular place. You just stay rooted to the spot. You don't move from one place to another and become those different characters. You're just in one place. So, VV would be let's see. I guess I could say maybe it's VV. I'd open the newspaper, I'd look in and then I see the picture that I become, Nixon, instead of showing the picture I become him. But I'd have to spin around. I mean, that could be VV, I guess. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. That's good. It's good challenge. I have to think about it. Okay. Well, quite often, Kenny and I will just be up all night, you know, and one of us will get an idea and explain it to the other or the other one will listen and then either go ahead with it or come up with another idea and we go back and forth until it becomes a picture. It's the easiest way for me to think in terms of our ideas and then we come up with a sequence of different pictures so they all sort of come together that we have this unified concept and then we sprinkle in doses of our different techniques that we have discovered or created and then we practice. Practice until it's ready and then two days before the performance, Kenny says I need some English words. Oh, rats. And then we have to talk about the words. Now back in the day when we first started, we had a long, tome, full of words I wanted to use and then he just very judiciously picked out different words to use. You should explain the vocal technique, Kenny. Come on, you should come up here and do that. There's no time. Okay. Well, Kenny doesn't say every single word that I sign. What he does is more like ASL like for a gun that's shooting. He'll just make the sound effect or if the helicopter blades are going he'll make the helicopter sound. But he wants the attention to be on the ASL and on the deaf performer, not on his words. Oh, I'm sorry. Time's run out. But please feel free to meet me at the lobby so we can continue this discussion and thank you so much.