World-renowned theatre company Dead Centre make their Royal Court debut, collaborating with Sign Language poet Zoë McWhinney. Told through a mix of spoken English, British Sign Language (BSL), creative captioning and silence, Deaf Republic brings together an ensemble of deaf and hearing actors, aerial performers, puppetry, live cinema and poetry. We sat down with Ben Kidd, Bush Moukarzel, and Zoë McWhinney to discuss their upcoming performance.
Deaf Republic is adapted from a poetry book of the same name, how did you go about the adaptation process?
Ben: Well, step one was to read it!
Bush: Well, I was going to say step one was to think about the team and who would make this show. Dead Centre as an independent company is just us three [Ben and Bush, and Tilly, the producer on the show] of us. So we had to think outside of that to pick which kind of team we want to build the story and it became very clear that, because of the nature of the story, we want deaf artists and hearing artists working together. On top of that, we wanted to reflect some of the strategies of storytelling in the poem. We wanted to engage aerialists, puppeteers, filmmakers, and different ways in which we can capture and reflect the world of Ilya’s poem.
So step one was to build the right team, try to understand how to create a show where the signing will be in British Sign Language while we’re playing the UK and Irish Sign Language in Ireland. And learn before we do anything with the content. How do we have an accessible room, how to make sure that we have an accessible structure so we can work well and communicate well with each other.
Ben: Yeah, and then you just try and think of all the best ideas, I suppose. The poems are really fantastic and the book is vibrant and rich and really really compelling. But a lot of where a book lives is in the reader’s imagination and in the theatre you don’t quite have the same luxury of that: everything you do in a theatre is literally happening in front of people’s eyes, on a particular night of their life in which they’re going through all sorts of other things.
So the adaptation process is about trying to figure out how we translate this text into something, and not do a poetry reading, basically. How can you create something that has its own life and its own reason to exist in its own right? So it was kind of about trying to find a theatricality to a theatrical reason to tell the story. A reason why this might be happening in a theatre. A reason why people might be sitting in a room watching it. And to try and unlock a way in which the story can be told specifically in a theatrical form.
What methods do you use to bring out the poetic to the form of theatre?
Zoë: We wanted to honour Ilya’s poetry, so the focus for me was to look at how I could preserve his imagery and the spirit of the story through the translation process into sign language. My aim was to also look at the relationships in the scenes and how they are
conveyed through sign lanaguge. As well as the translation, we have used projection and subtitles to directly bring his poems into the theatre.
Ben: Illya creates so many rich images and it’s great to use him as inspiration to try and find a visual form for those images. It is also a nice collaboration with him, even though he’s not directly in the room with us. The audience would feel short-changed if they came away and hadn’t heard or read or seen signed some of his extraordinary words.
Bush: We use the poems as provocations and as inspiration to find the theatrical equivalent, but sometimes it’s also important to let the language in. We don’t want the audience to come and go and not hear or read some straight-up poems by Ilya Kaminsky. So we wanted to find a context that they can enter the evening and exist as intended, as written by him. So that’s another ambition: to let the poetry in as well, and not just as if we’ve translated it.
Zoë: Inspired by the Ukrainian alphabet we created sign names for characters and places. By blending these two sign languages, Ukrainian and British, we wanted to show the power of resistance in the occupied town of Vasenka. To confuse the aggressor, it’s especially poignant as the word “Boycott” derives from the Irish resisting against the British occupation. My father is Northern Irish so it’s lovely for me to be back in Ireland, especially working with a company based in Dublin.
You only have to read the history of Ireland to see what is happening now in Ukraine and Palestine. The play bears witness to this struggle, as does Ilya’s poetry. Even though the violent occupation in Ireland was years prior to what we’re seeing now in the world, it echoes like astute poetry would.
Do you feel like that’s the main relationship between poetry and the theatre, the fact that theatre can expand the poetry?
Zoë: It’s interesting because the sign for ‘Puppet’ is quite similar to the sign for ‘Politics’ in BSL, it’s just a slight turn of hand. Ilya Kaminsky cleverly creates characters who, in their own right are a troupe of professional puppeteers. Especially in British and Irish sign languages, the sign for “politics” is signed like pulling the strings.
The gauze used within the play, expresses poetic elements of the script; the eye becomes a pin-camera and the images that are projected onto the gauze allow the audience to become a deaf ‘listener’. Even though the puppet theatre on the stage is small, the gauze and the projection enlarge the visual world. Dead Centre is trying to capture the same lived experience of a native signer when they watch BSL story telling and Visual Vernacular. The hearing audience are given the opportunity to experience life through the deaf lens, whether they realise it or not. It’s an amazing experience to capture the deaf brain
Visual Vernacular (VV) is a form of storytelling in sign language. It is based on the classifiers in sign language with added elements of personification, visual metaphors, and with similar effect as the use of onomatopoeia in spoken language. For example, the word Engine; we could express this by, [Zoe shows the engine loudly vibrating through movement and facial expressions] which gives it a tone, which becomes poetry within itself.
VV has the ability to zoom in and out of what’s being seen. You see the full picture with the movements that represent the larger things – let’s say for example a dark broiling cloud floating overhead. But in the same VV poetry recital, you might also see every minute detail amplified, like a condensed raindrop falling from the sky. This is mirrored on stage through the live camera feed.
Could you tell us a bit more about the decision for characters in the show to become Deaf overnight?
Ben: Ilya writes a book about, and this isn’t a spoiler cause it was published years ago, a community of people who, when a soldier kills a young deaf boy in their town, they all become deaf. And he explores the idea that deafness is not a disability but it is a unifier, it creates community. The deafness creates solidarity and creates community and it is an act of resistance because it allows the people of the time to no longer hear the orders of the army who are oppressing them. And this is not Ilya’s idea, he explores it very beautifully, but it’s a well-known idea that what mainstream society will sometimes consider a disability can also be thought of as the unifying and important and empowering characteristic that a community shares.
Zoë: Being deaf isn’t seen by the townsfolk as a particularly political identity at the start of the narrative. Then when the deaf boy, Petya, is killed, deafness is one of the ways they form solidarity as townsfolk, under the occupation that harms and kills. Stepping into the world of Deafness and sign language becomes a form of resistance against the occupation.
This extended -and embodied – metaphor is a radical rejection that being deaf is a disadvantage. All the characters becoming Deaf is them reclaiming peace, agency and empowerment back. I think it is also a metaphor for an overwhelming desire to be free from occupation, with an undercurrrent of anger and grief; as a means to immediately start living in a world without occupation. To say “I’m refusing your occupation, I’m deaf, fuck your orders, fuck your occupation”. I think that’s the essence of Deaf Republic. The last tools at the disposal of the disenfranchised; our bodies and the stories we tell through our language that lives on.