Can NYC’s Deaf performance community ever have it all?
Amid media controversy and Broadway lawsuits, American Sign Language performers and interpreters are juggling their resources to make Deaf theater as diverse and accessible as possible.
Nestled between East Village’s Avenue B and C is the black-and-white muraled entrance to the Nuyorican Poets Café, home to comedy, music, and other intimate performances since its founding in 1973. Tonight, its brick-covered walls and small carpeted stage — it appears no longer than 10 feet long — are the host of ASL Slam, a monthly gathering of poetry and storytelling in American Sign Language for the city’s Deaf community and anyone else who finds themselves at the doors of the venerated local institution.
“That’s my goal, to make people from all over feel welcome in that space,” explains the show’s host, Deaf performer Zavier Sabio, through an interpreter. “[To] bridge the gap between different communities: the ASL community, the Deaf community, the hard of hearing community, the hearing community. You name it.”
First to the stage is Yiru Chen, a hearing school teacher at Brooklyn’s St. Francis De Sales School for the Deaf. She discovered ASL Slam as a first semester ASL student during her undergraduate years at New York University, though she admits she spent her early attendances hiding in the corner to avoid being pulled up onstage. Today, she holds a Masters in Deaf Education from Columbia University.
Zavier signs Chen’s name to the audience, inviting her onstage. For hearing guests who can’t understand him, the voice of Alberto Medero, the show’s English interpreter, fills the room. Medero interprets as Chen steps up and addresses the audience, introducing her poem inspired by springtime. Chen raises a curved hand to the height of her face and turns it side to side, signing a mirror in ASL. Medero’s voice goes silent as her poem begins, as is custom.
When Chen steps down, the rest of the show commences. Between live performers and video poems playing on a projector, like Rosa Lee Galimore’s rendition of “Cocoon Child” which ends in a brief interactive discussion, audience members are called to the stage to take part in signing games. In one game, players are given a handshape, a configuration of the hands and fingers from which words and signs are formed, with the task of creating a story. A member of the audience choses a three-finger shape, with the thumb, index and middle finger extended.
The five onstage stumble through a nonsensical story, each adding a sign as they go. “Horse,” “car,” “hear,” “orgasm” — Medero catches himself at the latter. “There are kids in the audience,” he apologizes to the humor of those who can hear him. He decides on alternatives to the word as the story repeats itself, growing with each new participant. (“Orgasm” is also signed to the confusion of ASL learners in the audience. To a beginner, the three-finger sign is hard to distinguish from that of a “bug”).
When the show is over, the room clears quickly. Deaf and hearing alike will spend the rest of their night at Mama’s Bar on the corner of 3rd St and Ave B.
A well known event in the ASL community since its earliest shows in 2005, ASL Slam has garnered more media attention in recent months than ever before. In January, Sabio was featured in a New York Times article about the show, pegged to an increase of diversity in theater.
No one knows better than the members of the Deaf performance community like Sabio that media coverage of their industry is surging. For the past few years, attention on films like 2021’s three-time Academy-Award-winning CODA have brought a new audience to the world of Deaf arts.
This year, videos of Justina Miles, the Deaf ASL interpreter who performed alongside Rihanna at the Super Bowl, racked up millions of views on TikTok and YouTube, though the Super Bowl had been scrutinized by both Deaf watchers and interpreters for failing to broadcast the entirety of interpreted performances. Clips of music interpreters at concerts and festivals are gaining social media traction through similar platforms. In turn, the attention of a hearing viewership is piqued.
Some call the era a modern Deaf Renaissance, with increasing numbers of Deaf actors appearing on Broadway. This includes roles not written for Deaf actors, like the portrayal of Link Deas in the Broadway national tour of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was played by Deaf actor Anthony Natale last year.
But the Deaf performance community and their interpreters know that they more than just a viral moment or act. They’re finding their spotlight in New York City, amongst lawsuits and an ongoing fight for proper representation. If New York can sufficiently address their needs amid limited resources and media controversy, it could be a sign for the rest of the nation to follow suit.
“I’m inspired that the media is giving a spotlight on the ASL community,” says Sabio, in an interview days after the Slam. “But I want to make sure that people understand that ASL isn’t just a trendy topic. It’s our language, it’s our mode of communication. It’s our way of life.”
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Always a trailblazer for change, New York City’s recognition of the Deaf community sets a prominent example for how access can be interwoven into city culture. In 2018, it became the first city in the country to offer ASL Direct to Deaf residents, a means of accessibility to provide city services by video call.
The arts attract even more eyes — and labor. Both Deaf-run and Deaf-accessible theater are layered with more roles than mainstream shows, from ASL directors brought onto hearing productions to signing performance interpreters and Deaf actors themselves.
“Historically, I would say that most interpreters for theaters have been skilled, but in the last five, six, seven years, there has been an improvement,” says New-York-based Deaf actress Maleni Chaitoo, through an interpreter. “There has been a recognition that you want to select interpreters that are appropriate for the characters being represented on the stage.”
In November of last year, a white interpreter filed a lawsuit with Broadway’s The Lion King musical — specifically, the non-profit interpreting company that provides the show its interpreters — after being let go from the production and replaced with a black interpreter. “Keith Wann, though an amazing ASL performer, is not a Black person and therefore should not be representing Lion King,” wrote Shelly Guy, the director of ASL for The Lion King, in an email picked up by media outlets during the suit.
To many, the lawsuit was abominable. Raven Sutton, a black Deaf performer and influencer posted a TikTok addressing the matter. “It’s the audacity for me!” reads her closed caption as she signs to the camera. “Really! The one thing about being an interpreter is knowing when an assignment is the best fit for you.”
Her comments were mixed. “My dear, so you want segregation?” reads a comment with a white profile picture. “How…racist of you,” says another.
While discussions of race are certainly not new to the arts, performance interpreting is catching on slower. It’s a shift that ASL Slam interpreter Medero has lived through firsthand. A Bronx native, the hearing interpreter grew up with Deaf family members. As a child, he remembers going down to South Street Seaport for Deaf Night Out, an ASL-based community event that exists all around the country. He’s been immersed in the city’s Deaf culture ever since.
ASL is Medero’s first language, and “interpreter” was a role he played long before it became his career. Zooming in from a classroom — where he works his day job in educational interpreting — he remembers his earliest memories performing for his parents, when he’d explain his music to them as a kid.
For nearly two decades, Medero’s work was in education and medicine. “That’s all they felt I was good for,” he says. Then the Black Lives Matter movement illuminated the absence of Black signers in his white-dominated field. “During BLM, I was asked to do music [interpreting], and that was interesting. Usually I’m never asked that.”
Medero credits the movement for raising awareness for BIPOC professionals. “I didn’t know what that term was before that,” he says. “And I guess everyone had to reevaluate their list of interpreters. They realized they didn’t have a BIPOC interpreter on their roster, and then everybody just started scrambling. I’m getting calls from this place, that place. ‘Hey, could you do this?’ ‘Could you go to Lincoln Center?’ I mean, I’ve been in places that I probably would have never been privy to.”
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The race to include diverse interpreters brings up a distinct reminder: ASL interpreting and ASL performing are not one and the same. “It’s somewhat of a fine line, I think, between acting and interpreting,” says Beth Prevor, founder of Hands On, one of New York City’s only ASL interpreting companies catered to performance interpreting. “You want to have some ability to project an actor’s emotion without taking too much of the focus away from the actor. It’s a skill that some interpreters have, and some interpreters don’t.”
Historically, most Deaf theater productions did not have English interpreters. That is, until vocal translation proved to expand their viewership. “Today almost all theater with Deaf actors will be accompanied by voice,” writes authors Tom Humphries and Carol Padden, in their 2005 book, Inside Deaf Culture.“The history is in part about changing audiences, from within the community to more public arenas.”
The chapter this excerpt comes from, “Technology of Voice,” poses the voice as an object, one that “can be usefully thought of as technology,” or a “commercial commodity” when it comes to hiring interpreters.
The same logic of human skill as a form of communication technology can be applied to mainstream shows. At Hands On, Prevor and a small network of advisors and freelance interpreters work with theaters to expand their shows to Deaf audiences. A theater hires Hands On to provide interpreters and Deaf directors who can translate the show from English to ASL, and then studies the space to configure interpreters for live productions and arrange seating for Deaf audience members. From productions at Radio City Music Hall to Shakespeare in the Park, it’s up to Hands On to advertise tickets to the Deaf community.
As a not-for-profit company, Hands On doesn’t have the resources to support more than a few theaters at a time. Interpreters have bills and rent to pay, like any other professional; the work, Prevor explains, should be respected as such. “It’s going to ultimately be theaters that have bigger budgets that can afford to do it,” Prevor says. “We’re not a free service, nor do I think we should be a free service.”
To stay in business, Hands On relies on payment from theaters and grant funding from organizations like The New York State Council on the Arts. And their small size means they can’t always offer the right fit for every show.
“We don’t necessarily have equal representation in our field of every community that potentially is going to be in a theater,” explains Prevor. “That’s where we’re needing to involve the Deaf community in these conversations about, ‘What is it you want us to do?’”
Chaitoo notes the change in how theaters are approaching their interpreter selection, and she is pleased with what she’s seen.
“In the past, [theater] interpreters were fine, but it was that same set of interpreters over and over again, which meant that we weren’t giving other interpreters opportunities to gain experience and be involved in this work,” she said. “We’ve got tons of interpreters in communities that need more opportunities, and that change over the last five years has been very welcome.”
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Last month, Chaitoo performed in a one-act play put on by New York-based artist group The Why Collective called Words of the Prophets, a theatrical poetry reading that incorporated visual arts like dance and ASL storytelling to convey its themes of homelessness, sex work, disability, and mental illness.
In front of a small audience at The Cell Theatre in Chelsea, five characters took turns onstage as their stories were told through the poetry of hearing playwright Vayl Larkin, who based each role on real-life subjects.
Of the three narrators who appeared onstage, one spoke and two signed, the latter split between a storyteller — a role played by both Chaitoo and Deaf actor Dickie Hearts — and Medero, the show’s audio interpreter. Throughout the show, he translated non-spoken sounds like paper rustling and women harmonizing.
After the show, a talkback welcomed the audience to comment on the experience and discuss the play’s execution with its creators.
One critique came from AJ, a Deaf audience member and friend of Medero’s. Her comment regarded a scene in the play telling the story of a mother’s suicide. “The mother’s section was beautiful,” she told the creative team through an interpreter. “But it was a male voice. I think when we’re talking about parental mental health, it should be a female voice.”
The team responded with gratitude. “It’s impossible to represent the lives that exist on Earth in one play,” said Julian Wild, the play’s vocal storyteller. “We thought it was responsible to still try and tell the story as best we could and to be wrong, and to call attention to that wrongness and say we’re doing as well as we can.”
AJ isn’t alone in suggesting that representation in Deaf theater is lacking. “It really depends on the play, the content of the play, and the characters in it,” says Chaitoo. More and more, performers and interpreters are pushing the envelope of how they make their shows more accessible, and representation is a vital component.
“My feelings about any multi-layered art is that when you add a layer, you have to treat it with great care,” says Sydney Anderson, The Why Collective’s Founder and Artistic Director.
But not all theaters have the money to pay teams like Prevor’s. And not all teams like Prevor’s have an interpreter for every show.
According to a 2018 annual report from the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID), nearly nine in ten interpreters registered were white females. (The original report is no longer accessible online, and other sources reflect that number was closer to six in ten that same year. There is little to no data reflecting ASL interpreter demographics for more recent years.)
Some argue that ASL interpreting is a service like any other — a skill that a person either has or does not have, as explained by Prevor. As such, race should not factor into work opportunities. But this isn’t always true.
“Let’s talk about theater,” says Chaitoo. “It really depends on the play, the content of the play, and the characters in it. Let’s say it’s a story within the black community. You would want to have interpreters selected who can represent that story, who have that background, the knowledge, the attitude, the cultural awareness, and that can be incorporated into their signs.”
The same can be said about music. Last month, Columbia University hosted their annual Feel the Music Conference, a Zoom gathering created by the ASL community of Columbia Teachers College in accordance with their yearly Feel the Music Concert. DC-based music interpreter Rodney LeBon presented his work through a talk called “Prep and Vibe: Intro to Working in Music Setting for Interpreters.” In it, he detailed the importance of cultural self awareness.
“You don’t want to take anything away from the culture and what [the artist] is trying to give the audience,” he told the group in ASL, his Zoom square side-by-side with an English translator. “You want to make sure that you’re respectful of the music that you’re doing, and not providing any mockery or appropriation of that culture. If you’re not a good cultural fit for that assignment, it’s important to recognize that you need to step back.”
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When it comes to interpreting poetry, theater, or music to a visual language, exact translations are nearly impossible. It’s not uncommon for hearing English speakers to assume ASL has a sign for every English word, but that description is better suited for SEE (Signed Exact English), which is not American Sign Language.
Like any other language, ASL has a rich vocabulary and grammar that differ from that of others. It also varies in part by region. As a visual mode of communication, ASL relies largely on classifiers and facial expressions, all necessary features in the translation of music or poetry to sign.
In his talk at Columbia’s Feel The Music Conference, LeBon explained the core of work and what it takes to do his job right. “You have to remember that music is a story,” he said. “You have to have a good skill to really connect the concepts together.”
LeBon, though hearing, began learning ASL when he was eight. A US-born Haitian interpreter, he also speaks English, French, and Haitian Creole. For college, LeBon attended Gallaudet University, the only institution in the nation where bilingual higher education is offered in ASL.
“I would often go to parties with friends, and they wanted to know what the songs [were] saying,” he says of his time at Gallaudet. “So of course, I was happy to do that. But at the same time, I realized that I didn’t actually listen to the words of the music, I just recognized the feeling that it evoked, or the joy of dancing to it. When I was put in a position of interpreting, it was very different. [It was] frustrating because I loved music, but I felt like I wasn’t able to convey it.”
While difficult to master, translating music to ASL doesn’t erase its artistic qualities. “Music has rhyme,” says Feel The Music Conference speaker JW Guido, the former Artistic Director of American Deaf Theater, through an interpreter. “For instance, songs incorporate words that sound very similar to each other.”
But rhyme and rhythm exist in ASL too. Guido uses the same open-five handshape to give the audience an example, just like the players of ASL Slam’s poetry game, when challenged with their 3-finger story. He also explains classifiers, another feature of sign language. “These are used to identify movements and objects using handshapes,” he says. “But I want to emphasize that these are not ASL vocabulary. It’s more of a description of things and their relation to space.”
Given the complexities of the language, it’s imperative that music and theater interpreters are highly skilled, both in their fluency and performances. All that remains is the necessity that no one is excluded.
“If you had unlimited money, you still wouldn’t have unlimited resources,” says Prevor. “You can’t have one without the other, and there’s a finite number of people able to do it.”
But how do you expand your resources? In an industry that could use more hands, it’s the perfect time to address what’s missing. And if money isn’t the only problem, there must be another solution.
According to Medero, it starts with equal opportunity.
“It’s unfortunate that a lot of the skilled players in this game are white counterparts,” he says. “So the question becomes, how can we better equip everyone so that the skill can be there and we can even the playing field?”
Representation is the cherry on top of the cake, he explains. “If everyone can taste the cake and we all come to a consensus that it tastes pretty good, now we can decorate. But regardless of whoever took that job, we’re there for the Deaf consumer. We’re not there to check a box for representation.”
