Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets, and a Classic American Musical

Maria

emphasize is the dance as competition. Christopher thinks, pauses , and fixes his work on the fly. In the new version, only the principals perform the mambo, Riff and Velma from the Jets, Bernardo and Anita from the Sharks. The competition becomes externalized and even involves a winner, Anita. The promenade sequence poses even greater difficulties. All the girls, Sharks alternating with Jets, take the inner circle facing right. The boys form a protective outer ring, also alternating, facing left. When Terri’s piano picks up a soft marching tune, the two circles begin to rotate, walking in opposite directions. After exactly eighteen measures, the music stops and the two rings halt. When it works—which isn’t often during rehearsals—each actor should find an actor of opposite gender from the opposing gang at his or her shoulder. Even for an all-hearing cast, this feat would require some repetition, a careful coordination of stride and tempo. Many of the deaf actors have trouble maintaining a rhythmic pace. Again and again, people begin early or late, walk too quickly or slowly, and end up too far from their new, unwanted partner, thus forming a circle filled with enormous ragged holes. On nights when one or more dancers are absent, the whole thing falls apart. The problem of gender balance also causes problems, because the Jets will not allow Anybodys (Meredith Blair) to take part in the dance. This leaves the dance boy-heavy, and to compensate, Diane pulls Action (Richard Atkins) out of the dance group and tells him that Action, already disdainful and cynical, would never have any truck with such silly boy-girl shenanigans. Richard plays this up, giving high fives to his Jet buddies as they process around the circle, then ignoring or insulting each of the Sharks in turn. Anybodys’s disgust translates into her leaping on top of an available milk crate and conducting her way through the dance, a physical choice that also allows the group at large to use Anybodys as a visual cue to begin and end the dance. Even so, every dancer has a moment where they have their back to Anybodys, and cannot possibly keep her conducting in view. Moreover, with Action and Anybodys on 74 Deaf Side Story the sidelines, the dance is now Shark-heavy, so Diane plucks Anxious (Jarrell Robinson) from the band of Sharks and hands him a small set of bongo drums. Drums, preferably “a lot of drums, big drums,” have been a part of Christopher’s conception for months, because deaf dancers often synchronize themselves to music by feeling drumbeats through the floor, but Terri and Diane, while supportive, have worried that too much drumming might overwhelm the songs, especially with only a piano to provide the music. Obtaining a large drum remains an option, but Diane hopes that a simple bongo will do the trick, if only because it’s portable and takes up no more space than any other prop. She sets Jarrell on another handy milk crate under the lowest scaffold and asks him to tap out a beat to match Terri’s piano. Jarrell, who has reasonable hearing, is fascinated with music, especially percussion, and during breaks in rehearsal, he can often be found at the piano, banging out chords and testing for himself the limits of sound. At other moments, he plays havoc with Terri’s portable electric keyboard , creating a cacophony of strange, nerve-testing noises. He periodically vanishes to walk the halls, darting around like a human Superball. Whenever Diane calls a rehearsal to order and tries to figure out who is present and who is missing, it is usually Jarrell who has taken a last-minute trip to the restroom, or simply upped and disappeared, despite the best efforts of the dorm parents. As a bongo drummer, however, Jarrell proves to be as dependable as clockwork. Between Jarrell’s tattooed beats and Meredith’s who-cares conducting, the promenade gradually comes under control.
Communication during rehearsals is always frenetic, carried on in at least two languages and fed by a hodgepodge of Dance at the Gym 75 connecting sign systems, gestures, grunts, and the occasional complete breakdown. Nor can anything be accomplished without first translating the script into some sort of agreed-upon sign language. What, for example, will be the Sharks’ sign for themselves? What will they use to signify the Jets? In...