Eve Battle | Valencia (EFE).- A creative team made up of actors, musicians, sound and image technicians, graphic artists and a luthier have merged with a group of deaf people in a “mutual listening”, which has resulted in “Pull & Play”, a multimedia and inclusive theatrical work baptized with the name of “sound deaf”.
This is the first show of the Companyia Sonora, produced by the Valencian LaCasaCalba, whose process was recorded by Andreu Signes in “Sordonora”, a documentary that will premiere on May 6 in the official section of the DocsValència Festival, at the Octubre Center of Contemporary Culture.
“The idea was to make a sound scenic piece with the creative participation of deaf people, that would be inclusive, that they could come to see together with hearing people and in which we could all learn from each other,” he says in a conversation with EFE. Franscesc Burgos, artistic director of La CasaCalba, based at the Teatro del Raval in Gandia (Valencia).
The Burgos team presented the idea to the Art for Change call from La Caixa, which subsidizes projects that work on the social inclusion of groups in vulnerable situations through art, and was one of the 18 chosen among the 200 proposals presented nationwide. national.
Burgos, together with the musician, actor and educator Cento Carbó, and the Association of Deaf People of Gandia (Apesorga) began the joint work that they proposed as a process of “mutual learning”, which gradually took the form of a script for a scenic piece under the theater direction by Ruth Palonés.
environmental awareness
CasaCalba also promotes awareness, through art, of environmental problems related to the excessive proliferation of waste, which it applied to the project.
To do this, he relied on the luthier Ángel Di Stefano, who was in charge of making a “tower” with musical instruments created from recycled objects, adapted to the scenic piece and to the different sound sensibilities of the deaf community, with the help of the technician audiovisual Jesus Melo.
The result was “Pull & Play”, the story of two astronauts, “Pelut i Pelat” -played by Burgos and Carbó- who travel through space aimlessly after losing connection with the base of operations and try, through signals audible, contact them again.
The signals will be picked up by a planet inhabited by deaf people, who will offer them welcome and with whom they will learn a new form of communication through sign language.
The president of the Gandia Association of Deaf People, José Juan Signes, one of the main actors in the play, is enthusiastic about the outcome of the project. Most of the deaf people who appear on stage had not had any experience with acting, he explains, except for some workshops or small plays, in internal spaces of the collective.
Mimicry and expressiveness, other ways of communicating between deaf people and with hearing people
Signes, who is profoundly deaf, points out that mimicry and expressiveness is, in addition to sign language, one of the ways of communicating among the deaf community and also with hearing people.
The team worked on this interpretive resource in the play, which is accompanied by a minimalist staging, in which the astronauts wear black -in a nod to the color used by sign language interpreters- on a white stage, and in which the image, with the use of ‘mapping’, holograms, subtitles, a sign interpreter and adapted sounds, accompany the cosmic journey that more than 4,000 spectators have already experienced.
The play premiered at the RRRR! Art and recycling festival organized every year by LaCasaCalba and was included in the school campaign that the Teatro del Raval offers to schools, becoming one of the most successful works among those offered for this public, aged between 6 and 12 years.
Parallel activities
The interdisciplinary company has also developed, in parallel, other scenic proposals, has promoted interpretive workshops among the deaf and sign language communities, and is working on a new sound and audiovisual installation.
Miguel Ángel Cuevas, social educator and the link between the Valencian company and the deaf association, praises that the project has managed to combine two cultures of the same society, that of hearing and deaf people, through “listening”, demonstrating that it is possible to come together and overcome differences.