2019 - Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria

Supported by NFC, program "Publics", agreement № 122-P – 18 – ORG1620-23 /18.09.2018

Marketing strategy for dissemination of the ready innovative gesture-verbal spectacle "Borders". Production of leaflets and posters, distributed by centers of Union of the Deaf in the city. Stara Zagora, Burgas, Yambol and Sofia.

Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria

Digital advertising campaign on the social network Facebook.

Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria

Developing active communication with audiences and inclusion to the activity of our organization.

Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria Development of the audience of people with hearing impairments in Bulgaria

STARA ZAGORA, 26.02.2019 | BURGAS, 27.02.2019 | YAMBOL, 28.02.2019 | SOFIA, 04.03.2019

Our contribution to the creation of a methodology for building theatrical gestures and verbal performances:

My name is Vasil Spasov. I am a hearing actor and director, directed "Kukunor I Unuki ” in Bulgaria as a member of Flower Theater. I already had experience with different types of theater - puppet theater, educational theater, forum theater, playback theater, improvisational theater, theater for reproduction, theater of collective creativity (Devised theatre), theater of the specific space (Site-specific theatre) and a sensory maze theater. So I was very open to the bilingual show, because. experimenting in new territories is part of my creative DNA.

There is no tradition of bilingual or other kind of inclusive theater in Bulgaria. There are some random performances, but very rarely. I myself have taken part in such, sounding pieces of deaf actors in the moments, in which a voice was needed above the text.

So I was ready to dive into the adventure

PREPARATION

Text preparation

What is the best text for a bilingual game? I still don't know the answer to that question. I know what a good text is for a hearing audience, but also for the Chuvash and the deaf - this was a question for me as a director from the very beginning of the process. So I read the play Kukunor I Kalahari several times and I followed my artistic instinct.

The first thing, which caught my attention, it was, that they were parts of the text, which were rhyming and very abstract in meaning - they were difficult to understand at first glance and their translation into sign language would hardly carry their true meaning. The repetition of the sound in the rhymes and the play on words would delight the hearing audience., but for the deaf they will confuse and make sentences difficult to understand. So my decision was to remove these rhyming parts and if possible, to try to find another way to put their message in

The second thing, what I noticed was, that the whole play is based on text. This, what i mean is, that words themselves are the main instrument of dramatic action. As far as I know, deaf people use many ways to interact with each other and words / the signs are just one of them. So my goal as a director was to invent and involve more "Without a word / no signs " scenes, to balance actions, based on the text. Later, at the performances I felt, that in these scenes the actors and the audience focus on the action itself, without words or signs to raise barriers between them. I made a few - "Opening stage"(about 8 minutes), in which the audience got acquainted with the characters and the situation, "Shooting scene" - a dramatic moment, in which they injure the woman, "Romantic scene" - flirting / love dance, in which the characters approach emotionally and physically.

The third thing, which was very important to me, the play had a very clear and strong construction. I knew, that because of the two channels of communication, which the audience will watch all the time, it will be overwhelmed by the complexity of storytelling, so my job as a director was to prepare a play, which is easily captured and monitored. In short - a simple story, which is delivered in a very new and complex theatrical way. So I edited the parts, which were not very clear from a structural and logical point of view.

The last part was the translation of the text into sign language. This process was done with a translator and actors, deaf and hearing. The focus here was to find the right signs for the words and when they didn't turn out to be appropriate - to replace them with other similar ones..

The pace was also a serious problem - was the sign language or verbal language faster or slower than the other? This question has become even bigger, when the rehearsals on stage began.

For me, the text for a bilingual play should be different from that for a play only for hearing people. Because we combine two communication systems, we need to find the intersection of their strengths. A cooperative approach would be the best way - whether done by one writer with a consultant or by two writers, but also "Hearing" and The "deaf" parts must be involved in this process, to carry all the richness of words and plasticity.

Actor training

Most of the actors did not know each other, met in this project for the first time. But that was not the problem. The biggest problem was doubt, that this method can work. For all four actors, this endeavor was something completely new; something, which they had never done before. I had to prepare them to play characters, presented by another actor / actress with different means of expression. And this character would interact with another character, also played by both a deaf and a hearing actor.

I started the preparation carefully, Step by Step. For starters - games. The first five rehearsals were just to build the team, getting to know, a sense of partner on stage and collaboration - nothing about the play itself. In these games, the actors found their ways of communication - how deaf and hard of hearing to give signals to their partners., how to interact on stage. Was a lot of fun, mistakes were taken only as steps along the way, which removed the tension from the "big task". We started to build mutual trust. we went into creative mode. It is very important to create such a "laboratory" atmosphere, in which people feel free to experiment and have no fear of failure. When we achieved it, we took another step - we started improvisation games. Initially, the task was simple - four people in different random or extreme situations. The actors begin to develop the situation through interaction between them. When they got used to it, we switched to improvisation in pairs, in which the two actors played a single character. Are they a mirror to their partner, its opposite or continuation of the idea taken by it - the combination of everything, which we found, is the best key. Then the couple began to interact with the other couple. And because this improvisation can be really confusing, it requires the concentration and partnership of the team to rise to another level. They took control of the situation, the actors felt ready to start working on the play.

But how does the director feel?

Preparation for the director

Stage rehearsals were approaching, and I still didn't know exactly how to do it. There were many unknowns in my head, but I was in "laboratory" mode, i.e.- open to the process. I certainly knew the following: the story, each character will be played by two actors, the need for a strong visual expression of the scenes, especially those with sounds in them. While choosing the actors, I chose the two hearing actors to be about fifty years old, and the two deaf, about thirty. I used this to enrich the characters. How will each of these ages react in different situations?

 

Rehearsals

The most important advice, which I can give to someone, who has decided to undertake such an undertaking, is: patience, patience, patience. Things are done slowly, but eventually they become. Mixing two languages, the intertwining of two worlds, finding their best intersections, requires time. This is a path of discovery, path of failures and victories. Here are some of the challenges:

Keeping up the pace - it is difficult for two participants to have the same emotional and reactive speed, even if they read the same text at the same time. And imagine how much harder it was in our case… We put a lot of effort, so that the dialogue goes on all the time at the same time. We had to further edit some of the text or characters, to keep the flow. Sometimes we consciously looked for a different pace in the couple, but it was in special moments, when we wanted to emphasize something important. If we tried to synchronize the actors in many emotional moments, they looked like robots, so we were looking for a specific solution to each specific situation.

Two actors - one character - this is a very creative task. As I said before, the best way for us was to combine mirror, evolving and contradictory. But the combination is done on different scales in the cases, in which communication takes place in the couple and from this one, in which communication is with the other hero-couple or between different parts of oneself. For example, in our version of the play, the woman is alone on stage and there is a great internal conflict - so every actress retires - the young deaf actress wants to love the man., and the mature actress - to hate and kill him. The difficulty was this, that they had to have the same text. We solved the problem using just one phrase, which was repeated several times, whereby the conflict became more visual and physical.

Misansen! The first difficulty stems from the fact, that to be understood, deaf actors have to gesture like that, so that it can be seen by the audience, which means, that they should not play in profile or back. Another problem is, that when gesturing they can't do anything else with their hands - to play props or other physical actions. If such a thing is necessary, they must pause the text, until they perform the action and only then continue the text.

And so, with this in mind, we tried to use the whole scene and have different variants of interaction - deaf with deaf, hearing with hearing, hearing with deaf.

Balance! All participants must be equal on stage, no one to lead or support. So each of the four actors through the play had their own special moment of attention as an individual and each character - as a couple of partners..

Style of action - when deaf actors gesture, it is necessary to select the physical expression of the hearing actors and to focus more on the speech and the implementation of the action with this tool. The balance in the team is sought again.

How a director observes two simultaneous actions?! Many things were happening on stage at the same time and it was difficult to understand at once. So my approach was to focus on one thing and look at it carefully, while the whole action was going on. For example, I just focus on the deaf actors or listen to the lyrics of the hearing actors or watch one pair and then change the focus. The approach was again step by step.

REPRESENTATION

Our premiere was in Sofia and I thought, that the deaf community will be present en masse, because she is very eager to have a theater for the deaf in Bulgaria. But that was not the case. The audience was around 20% deaf and 80% hearing. On the contrary, in our tour in 3 the city in the country the audience was 90% deaf and 10% hearing. At our last presentation, again in Sofia, the spectators were 50/50 . For people, this was something completely new, so in the beginning we had resistance from each of the communities - it just took a while, until the hearing spread, that this new thing is good. For some deaf people in the country, this was the first theatrical experience and it was very valuable for our team. In the discussions after the performances, the main message of the audience was, that they want more theater like this. So somehow we created a hunger for bilingual performances, for which we want to share the responsibility with all theater actors in Bulgaria.

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