UK’s premiere Deaf/ HoH SIgndance Ensemble visits Gypsy + Workshops 9/9-9/13
Long time friends, the Sign Dance Collective, is on tour again, and passing through to meet and workshop with the Deaf and Hard Of Hearing Community this week.
Though no specific shows are slated, they will be afoot at the Gypsy~ rehearsing, meeting with friends, and doing informal workshops.
Interested parties should contact Isolte, director of Signdance, to ensure a meeting with these talented artists.
Please reply to- signdancetheatre@gmail.com
Carthage ***** review excerpt by Eric Mayer LSU @ No Passport Conference 2014 Louisiana State University
The much-anticipated performance of Carthage/Cartagena,written by Caridad Svich and developed with the Signdance Collective International played to a packed audience. The text ofCarthage/Cartagena is a series of multi-lingual letter-song-poems connected by themes of displacement, exile, and human trafficking. This verse play dramatizes moments of “desterrar,” or being ripped away from homeland and finding oneself in a foreign land. The piece stages the violent origins of diaspora, a recurrent topic raised throughout the (No Passport 2014)conference. . The verse ofCarthage/Cartagena enacts its diasporic imagination in its rendering of voices of individuals displaced by wars, human trafficking, and acts of violence. As a previous reviewer had pointed out, the play on words within Carta-ajena, could mean letter from afar, as well as a letter written in a foreign language. These “letters from afar” are not only written from spaces of dislocation, but also speak from the borderlands of the real, a space beyond representation and language, encircling the edges of trauma. The text of Carthage/Cartagena draws on multiple languages, English, Spanish, Italian, BSL and ASL as a strategy to approach this “unspeakable” space of trauma through the disconnected space between languages, and the gap between meanings lost in translation.
‘The SDCI was the perfect company to interpret the piece because they move between so many registers of language: spoken, sung, and embodied in their specific fusion of dance and sign. Images of homeland, like a lemon tree, a cake, or a spinning top, were invoked as the final vestiges of subjectivity from the edges of the traumatic experience.’ The SDCI’s approach was to interpret the loss of homeland as the structural loss of innocence. Coming of age in the blown-out wasteland ofCarthage/Cartagena means grappling with the shock of total loss, a retracing of the missing pieces of self, and transformation in a state of absolute exile. The ritual structure of the choreography, a spiraling transcendental meditation, made room for the co-presence of these lost voices—the casualties of violent acts of displacement—as they were re-imagined in performance.Carthage/Cartagena made for an intense and riveting end to this 8th annual meeting of the NoPassport Theatre Alliance.
“Hypnotic, poetic and unruly. The Signdance Collective represent the un-governable energy of art itself, railing and raging against tyranical forces. Beautiful to behold”
Caridad Svich, No Passport, New York
Please reply to- signdancetheatre@gmail.com
www.signdancecollectiveinternational.com