At the End of My Hands by Equal Voices Arts (review)

The year 2016 marks a decade since the adoption of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) as one of New Zealand’s official languages, alongside te reo Māori. (English, by far the most widely spoken language in New Zealand, is not actually an official language.) It is fitting, then, that it should also mark the national tour of Equal Voices Arts’ At the End of My Hands, New Zealand’s first touring theatre production to use both NZSL and English without formal interpretation. Presenting the two languages on an equal footing, the production suggested that theatre can provide a unique medium for staging the encounter between spoken and signed languages, and that the stage, as a site of gestural and embodied expression, permits the two languages to become mutually intelligible. In this, it represented a threshold for inclusive theatre in New Zealand, as well as an exploration of the ways in which the New Zealand context can contribute to international trends in Deaf and inclusive theatres.

At the End of My Hands emerged from a series of workshops held in 2015 in Hamilton, New Zealand, with members of the local Deaf community. The Deaf actors of the integrated Deaf-hearing cast, none of whom had a formal background in theatre, were drawn from this process. So also were the stories that formed the backbone of the production: a series of vignettes that played out the experience of Deafness in New Zealand, representing the stories that the Deaf actors and workshop participants felt most needed telling onstage. The play itself was devised through workshops, where the company’s two hearing actors, neither of whom had prior experience with sign language, and the four Deaf actors sought ways of communicating through movement and mime, or what director Laura Haughey prefers to call the “visual vernacular.” The traces of this process remained in performance: through the stories it tells, the embodied form the storytelling takes, and its focus on sites of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchange.

A flirtation between Deaf and hearing characters (Kelly Quirke and Shaun Fahey) in At the End of My Hands where the hearing character is played by Fahey, a Deaf actor. (Photo: Michael Smith.)

The play’s first vignette combined three brief encounters between a doctor and a series of mothers, juxtaposing the shared trepidations of a Deaf woman whose baby is diagnosed as hearing and a hearing woman whose baby is deaf, against the jubilation of a Deaf mother whose baby shares her deafness. Historically, the medicalization of deafness, its presentation as a problem or deficit to be solved or overcome, has been one of the frameworks that the Deaf community has railed against. In a direct repudiation of this way of understanding deafness, At the End of My Hands’s opening scene appropriated the medical setting to recast the moment of diagnosis not as the identification of disability, but as an induction into a community and a culture.

This understanding of Deafness as a cultural and community-based experience—signaled in writing by the distinction between the capitalized term Deaf for the cultural and linguistic identity, and the lower-case deaf for the audiological condition of hearing loss—guided the production’s approach as a whole. Conceiving of Deafness as a cultural position, the stories that At the End of My Hands told represented the encounter between Deaf and hearing people as a form of cross-cultural exchange. Like other multi-cultural and cross-cultural performances, these encounters were often comic: one scene showed two recalcitrant teenagers bonding through obscene gestures; another staged the humorous awkwardness of a flirtation across the Deaf/hearing line. Shaun Fahey, developing a tradition common across Deaf theatre, mimed the undisciplined gestures and incomprehensible gabbing of hearing people, a comic impersonation that caricatured the hearing sections of the audience’s own everyday speech and gestures, to produce that frisson of defamiliarization common to cross-cultural encounters.

Alex Lodge, Shaun Fahey, and Mihailo Ladjevac in At the End of My Hands. (Photo: Michael Smith.)

Mime, in this context, emerged as a...