Someone has *gasp* stolen the magic of Christmas from Snowdrop the fairy and we all need to help them get it back! Thus is the plot for ‘Christmas at the Snow Globe’ and excuse to get everyone involved – and included – in a fun, pun-filled festive show that didn’t take itself too seriously, or very seriously at all.

A towering tin-not-tin soldier, a surprising sibling, a miscast fairy and a stage manager who must have wondered what they’ve got themselves into are just some of the characters that join co-creator and director Sandi Toksvig on stage to solve this terribly naughty deed.

It was a lovely celebration of Christmas and hggye; narrative meets panto with a flavour of The Play That Goes Wrong. There was randomness, audience participation and carols helped along by a suitably fabulous choir. We were also called upon to assist with making some colourful decorations, a great festive activity that got strangers working together to make the place look as Christmassy as possible. It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

In and amongst it all, a ghostly yet cheerful king pranced and signed everything. Not only part of the action, they were part of the show, with their own lines, and interacted freely with the other characters. And this was every show. Yes, people, every performance of Christmas at the Snow Globe was BSL integrated. And both performances on the 22nd were captioned as well. I ended up seeing the show more than once, partly simply because I could (and because I loved it). How many pantos have a BSL interpreter for one performance, captioned for another and pretty much inaccessible for the rest of the run? And how often do we get to see carols in BSL?

It was interesting to see how the audience reacted to the interpreter, at first it didn’t seem as if the audience was sure what to make of it all but it didn’t take long before it felt like the interpreter had been fully accepted. It may have helped that weren’t afraid of a bit of visual, panto-style physical humour and after the very last carol, everyone, BSL fluent or not, knew how the interpreter really felt about figgy pudding.

My heart was already full of good cheer on seeing THAT video of the kids from Eastbury Community School performing the carol ’12 days of Christmas’ proudly playing on every screen in the Globe front of house and the fully involved BSL interpreter but when Sandi and the cast signed along with the penultimate carol… I defy the scroogiest deafie not to have a little melting puddle where their heart used to be.

Much kudos to Becky Barry the creative BSL interpreter, Daryl Jackson the BSL consultant, The Globe for being so proactive in including BSL this festive season and to Sandi Toksvig and all involved in the show. Maybe next year, a deaf elf joins the cast? Just putting it out there 🙂

Merry Christmas, one and all!

https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/christmas-at-the-snow-globe-2019/

(THAT video is at the link – it’s well worth a watch to get in the festive mood 🙂 )

This week, 12th – 18th March, is Sign Language Week in the UK (The international one will be in September), as the week that BSL was formally recognised as a language of the United Kingdom, on 18th March 2003.

15 years later and it’s arguable that not much progress has been made. BSL still does not enjoy the same legal status that other indigenous language of the UK do (Welsh for example) and recently, on 6th March, the proposal for a BSL GCSE was completely stonewalled despite clear support from various MPs in a parliamentary debate broadcast live on parliament.tv – the first live parliament debate to be broadcast with simultaneous BSL interpretation – after a petition started by Wayne Barrow gained thousands of signatures.

That said, other recent events have given me hope for the future. On 4th March, The Silent Child, a short film about a 4 year old deaf girl who lives in the proverbial world of silence until a social worker teaches her sign language, won an Oscar for best Live Action Short Film. An Oscar! And to make it even better, the writer and actress Rachel Shenton signed her acceptance speech because she’d promised the film’s star, the amazing Maisie Sly, that’s what she’d do if they won. Sign Language in an acceptance speech hasn’t happened since Marlee Matlin won her Oscar in 1987. The speech hit the headlines and the cheers of the deaf community went up around the world. Also, this video of Maisie’s father telling her how proud he is of her is the most adorable thing I’ve seen in a long time.

On the same evening, Deafinitely Theatre won an Off-West End award for Best Production with their play Contractions, which had been performed in BSL and English at the New Diorama Theatre in November 2017. It was just their luck that the Offies clashed with the Oscars or they’d have been the big news of the day. As it is, congratulations are richly deserved by in that production as well.

And just last week, on Tuesday 13th March, I saw Hamlet, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company no less, interpreted in BSL. Not just interpreted, integrated – instead of being shuffled off to the side of the stage and respectfully ignored by the cast as usually happens, this interpreter was in amongst the action, shadowing Hamlet and the other characters, running with them, occasionally offering comfort and *gasp* emoting. She interpreted Shakespeare non-stop for three hours and thoroughly deserved the flowers she got from the cast at the end – who also signed “thank you for coming” in unison to the audience. I take my hat off to Becky Barry, and to the RSC for having the wherewithal to have BSL interpreted / integrated and captioned performances – here’s a link to their upcoming assisted performances, they definitely deserve a look.

Shakespeare in BSL is not a new idea; Taking Flight Theatre in Wales have put on a BSL-integrated Shakespeare play every summer for the last few years and I was lucky enough to see Love’s Labour’s Lost fully performed in BSL by Deafinitely Theatre in 2012.

BSL is a beautiful language, and I can’t wait for the day that it has full legal recognition and protection in British Law. And a GCSE…

In honour of Sign Language Week, I decided to have a go at filming a Shakespearean sonnet, hoping to emulate Shakespeare’s eloquence in English in BSL. I hope I do it justice – both the sonnet and BSL!

Also, I thought it’d be a laugh to perform “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” on a snowy day in March 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=2J28-rWwyms

More about that show at Edinburgh Fringe, feeling lucky, feeling nervous, excited, terrified, all of the above! Here’s my BSL video with more info and transcript 🙂

Transcript:
Hello, my name is Donna Williams, I also use the name DeafFirefly… I just like the name 🙂

I’m a poet using both British Sign Language (BSL) and English. I love BSL and I also use English because I’ve become really interested in translation and how it works, how can perform poetry in two languages at the same time, if it works, will it work well?

I’m going to find out with a show at Edinburgh Fringe on 11th Aug at 1.30pm at Spotlites. I will have interpreters and I’ll be performing poetry in both BSL and English in varying levels, for example one poem may be more BSL, minimal voiceover, another may be BSL with just a visual script (no voiceover), another I’ll perform spoken with SSE, and so on.

I want to try different styles and combinations of language and get feedback from the audience on what works well. It’s called “Playing with Poetry” and that’s what it is! Hopefully it’ll answer lots of questions. Hope to see you there! 🙂

https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/deaffirefly-playing-with-poetry

Today is National Poetry Day and this years’ theme is Water. Since it’s chucking it down outside, that seems very apropos.

Lately, as well as composing BSL poems, I’ve been looking at translation; English to BSL and vice versa. I first became really interested in this when I went to the Signing Hands Across the Water poetry festival in America last year; it really hit me that all the ASL poets had voiceovers, but none of the BSL poets did.

That and a hilarious misinterpretation of one of my poems by a non-signing member of the audience and various discussion panels between the poets made me think about how poems might be translated across languages. I’ve had poems that I’ve written in English published, but struggle to translate them into BSL, and when trying to put English words to my BSL poems, all I can come up with are basic scribbles that do no justice to my meaning (in my mind anyway…)

Thanks to the Deaf Explorer project I had the opportunity to travel to America to meet The Flying Words Project, a poetry duo comprising Peter Cook, a Deaf ASL poet and Kenny Lerner, his hearing interpreter. They work together to create poems using ASL, English, mime and movement, effectively creating a whole new performance art.

They’ve been performing for decades, and they are amazing to watch. Seriously, check out their first poem in the video; they’re so well-rehearsed that Kenny can literally do it blindfolded. Respect. And Peter’s signs… wowee. And the poem about the dog (called Charlie) gets me every time. The show starts at 5.25, but if you watch the speech at the beginning with automatic captions, please do not be alarmed; it is indeed the Flying Words Project being introduced, and not the ‘violence project’. I think YouTube needs to work on their software…

In America, I was able to chat with them about their creative process, a fabulous experience, which only fuelled my interest in bilingual poetry. So can written poetry be translated into sign language and vice versa? Of course they can, but it’s not easy! So many grey areas, literal translation versus meaningful translation; translating whole lines versus just a few words here and there; everyone has a different way of looking at a poem, how to give as many possible versions or just one depending on the poet’s vision? Etc. Etc, etc.

So I thought, in honour of National Poetry Day, I’d have a go at translating a water-related English poem into BSL, and after some thought, the poem I chose was ‘The Rainy Day’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of my favourite poets.

The text of the poem will follow the video; this way people can choose to read it before or after watching the BSL translation; hopefully it will all make sense and I’ve done the poem justice!

Feedback welcome 🙂

And yes, I know this was posted over an hour after National Poetry Day officially ended. Technical issues. Bloody iMovie. Ahem.

Seriously, feedback welcome!

The Rainy Day

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still sad heart! And cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow