Santa: Two exciting things this year – the 20th Festival and your coming. And the third thing – the “Ode to Joy” is celebrating 200 years.

Amanda: Yeah, it’s an amazing coincidence, and it’s really, really exciting to bring this work to you guys and to work with the Latvian Association for the Deaf. They’re amazing people. Really excited to perform with them this kind of really beautiful, simple idea. So what we’re doing is we’ve taken Beethoven, one of his most famous works, the Symphony No. 9 and the “Ode to Joy”, and this poem we’ve translated into sign language, and we’re in the process of transforming that to from kind of international sign language into Latvian Sign language with the brilliant people in the Latvian Association for the Deaf, and we will perform it. Yeah, I can’t tell you how excited I am! I am packed. The installation is packed. The costumes are packed. We’re ready to get on the airplane to you.

Santa: And you will perform it in Mežaparks in Kokaru Hall, which is the biggest Singing Festival stage from the other side.

Amanda: And you know, it’s so beautiful to take such a famous piece of work, of choral, symphonic work, and to transpose that within this beautiful concert hall into sign language. We all know Beethoven was deaf. He was completely deaf when he wrote the symphony. He never heard it outside of his imagination. But actually, to bring that into the deaf experience has been really, really interesting. I’m a CODA, so my mom and dad are deaf, and I was brought up in the sign language community here in Ireland. And so it’s in my heart, deeply in my heart. But with this work, I worked collaboratively, very, very closely with two brilliant deaf artists, Leanne Quigley, who’s coming over with us, and Alvean Jones and the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf to work on the conceptual of it. So the poem talks about, really a strive for equality. So we, the millions, send kisses to the world. We are looking for equality. We’re looking to the future, to a togetherness. So really, it’s very potent when you speak this from the minority language of sign language with the deaf community, who are daily looking for equality and struggling for acceptance, recognition, inclusion, and it becomes very potent, and there’s lots and lots of other beautiful elements to it. Of course, we know that it is the European Union’s anthem. So this is really interesting in the context of Latvia being a new member of the European Union and Ireland, we are not very long in the European Union either. We are just 50 years in the European Union. So I love the idea that, like, literally, we are very west in Ireland, and we’re going to the very east of Europe in these difficult times. Let’s call it what it is. And you know, the Ode to Joy has been used in so many different contexts, as a moment of protest. It was used in many, many, many different places that are in flux, in a change or making a stand, but also it was used in other ways that we simply wouldn’t tolerate these days. There’s some very famous Third Reich recordings of the Ninth Symphony which are tricky, so beautifully complicated.

Santa: When I think of the “Ode to Joy” it’s a melody that sticks easily with you. Many kids learn it from very early on, because once you hear it, it’s easy to remember. I remember our uncle telling us that the first song his son was singing to himself was this melody. And then I heard that my kid is also whistling, because it just stays with you. So when you live in Europe, you live in this society, you feel like it’s a melody that you know from very early on. But you were born in a deaf family, right? (Amanda: yes) And I’m really curious, could you learn it? Could you hear it? What I’m really curious to ask you is what was your childhood like, and what was the culture, the songs that you were hearing?

Amanda: I have a very beautiful relationship with music, because I have no familial learning of music. Anything that I discovered, I discovered myself for the first time. When I was born (I’m the first and I have a brother and sister after me, I was the first hearing child to my deaf Mom and Dad), they were told by the social workers that they were worried that I wouldn’t be able to speak properly or understand the hearing world. And so they bought a radio. You know, I’m 53 and this is in the 70s. They had this radio that had a dial on top of it. My mother would come down and turn it on every morning, but it was always out of tune. So it was always [makes static noise]. Really it was just noise in the kitchen. It made no difference to me. And when I was about 12 we got a babysitter to come and mind us one summer, when my mother, my father were working. And she just turned the dial. I cannot tell you, the music came out, music that you could understand that was pleasant to the ear. It was really like a revelation that sound could be really beautiful. When I was in school, we studied music, it was part of the curriculum. And the teachers used to always say: “Amanda would be very interested in Beethoven, because she has deaf parents.” So being a teenager I was always told about Beethoven by hearing people. So I always had a fascination with him as a creative person who was deaf. It really made me understand that actually, deaf people can do everything. Yeah, I could see them – my parents were totally normal, they had jobs, they were intelligent. Sometimes outside in the world people would say to me, “Oh, your poor parents. Oh, you’re very good to mind your parents.” I’m a young child going, “What are you talking about?” Sometimes I have to tell you what they’re saying, or tell them what you’re saying. But otherwise, from my perspective, that was totally normal. But that bridge between the hearing world’s understanding and the deaf world’s access to normal life was always something that I had to manage. But Beethoven, I suppose because I was an arty little child, I knew I wanted to be an artist, Beethoven was a great inspiration to me.

Santa: Please call me out if I say something wrong, because I don’t have your experience, and I also can’t even imagine how different your childhood was. But I’m just thinking, as a hearing family or a hearing person, we pay so much attitude (attention?) to the music. We say, “it comes from your mother’s singing their lullabies”, for example, but we imagine it as part of our identity. Like that the music is part of your soul, or something like that, really, really deeply rooted, and comes from very early on. It must be you had some other substance?

Amanda: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, music is not embedded in me. It’s something very fresh that I learned or experienced myself. But what I’m so excited about and grateful for in my upbringing is the visuals. So everything was visual, the deaf community is very sensitive to it. So the beauty of a colour, the beauty of a shape, how you express yourself, how you carry your body, all of these things, the body and the visuals were really, really heightened, really sensitive.
For example, when I moved away from my family to go to college, when I was 18, I moved to a different city, and I shared an apartment with two of my friends. They’d say in the evening, “do you want a cup of tea?” I would think that I’m saying yes, but I didn’t use my mouth to say yes, the way we would do it at home. So I had to remember, when I went into the hearing world fully, that you have to articulate it. So we had such a sensitivity to visual communication, to body communication. I feel very blessed and lucky that that was my experience.

Santa: But still in childhood or when you were younger, what were the opportunities for a deaf family to go see some culture events?

Amanda: Never. The Dublin Theatre of the Deaf is very old, maybe over 50 years. We always went to their plays. They would have a play at Christmas time, and they would have a play sometime during the summer. These were great events. And deaf parties are hilarious. So deaf parties would probably play charades and miming, these are all the games that you would play. All of those things, I suppose, in terms of culture were very much embedded in the deaf world. And it wasn’t until maybe I was in my 20s that they started having professional sign language interpreters here in Ireland. Access to the theatre is really since the 2000s slowly, slowly, slowly building up.
I would never have had the experience of going to see something. When I was a kid, I did a lot of drama, because a lot of CODAs, which is what I am, what we call ourselves, CODAs, which is a child of deaf adults, strange name. I was involved in theatre and drama, and a lot of CODAs are very, very good with physically expressing themselves. And sometimes my mom would come to a play that I was doing in the school or something like that. But really I would come off stage and I would explain to her what had just happened, and she would sit politely, very bored, but nicely. And my dad would just be like, “No, I’d be bored. I’m not going.”

Santa: But that’s the thing which is confusing, these worlds exist in parallel. There’s culture in the deaf community, there are interesting events that are not accessible to me or others from the hearing community, and the deaf community feels the same way. I was at a New Year’s Eve celebrating together with a deaf community at their party, and I was one of the few who couldn’t participate in all of the jokes, all of the fun that was going on for hours and hours. It was the first time for me, the experience to know this is how our deaf guests feel at our parties, like there’s nothing happening.

Amanda: Yeah, it is really interesting. The deaf community all over the world are so interrelated, it’s almost like cousins in a big family, because of sign language. We all absolutely adore sign language, you can imagine, it’s the language that bridges all of these gaps, and the language is so different to verbal language, from how we express ourselves by moving our tongue and our throat and making sounds out of our mouth and listening at their ears to expressing things with your face, with your eyes, with your hands, with your body. So to be involved in a community that communicates with the body, with facial expressions, with the hands, gives you a radically different experience of the world. Sign language is a minority language and it is so beloved that it brings deaf communities all over the world together. Deep love doesn’t even describe how passionate we are about language. And that language has such a different modality, forgive me for speaking in kind of linguistic terms, that it creates a culture, no matter whether you’re in Latvia or whether you’re in Ireland or whether you’re in Germany, that has a bond because it is a visual and an embodied language. So deaf people connect all over the world, literally, via sign language and the passion for it and the culture that sign language brings up.
Everything visual is the primacy of sign language. So, in English we would say, “There’s a red car driving down the road” and in Sign language the most important part of that sentence is that it’s a car driving, and the next part of this, is that it’s red. So the perspective on the world shifts to give the visual most important information first.

Santa: Well, in French too we would add the ‘red’ in the end. But it’s also a different culture.

Amanda: Right, yeah, exactly. I mean really language and culture are so coupled, aren’t they? They’re so embedded with each other.

Santa: So we are expecting a very loving meeting when you come to Latvia and meet the community here, hopefully.

Amanda: Absolutely! I think we would be very bonded by the language. But also, I think that for the Deaf community to show themselves to the hearing world, as we call it, or the mainstream, is a really visceral, exciting thing to do, to show themselves and their beloved language to the mainstream, as in a way of of showing “We can do this, let us show you our culture. Let us show you our passion. Let us show you ourselves. Let us be seen in some ways.” It’s such a powerful thing, and brings with it a lot of love and joy. To describe, as the Ode to Joy does, a strive for equality really speaks to deaf people’s experience of the world. “Yes, look at us! We send you millions, kisses, but we are looking for equality. All men, all us mentioned, all men together.”

Santa: Still, as a festival organiser, I have to say, we haven’t had this tradition of actually inviting communities that have different ways of perception. It’s only over the last four or five years that we are trying to make our festival a bit more accessible. This relationship is in a very early stage, and I sometimes feel that the community is a bit precautious, because they are not really sure what our aim and reason is. Also they previously haven’t had access to classical theatre. I know that contemporary theatre is asking to come and do some things, and there’s no tradition. So this relationship sometimes is very slow and timid. We want to keep our doors open. At the same time, I can understand that there have been all kinds of experiences encountering the other part of the community, and you never know what’s going to be the end goal.

Amanda: But I know from the Latvian Deaf Association that the Homo Novus festival was awarded a brilliant prize from them for being the most exciting and the most accessible festival. I think my feeling from my short little visit with you last year where we did a flash mob version of Ode to Joy, building our relationship with myself and Leanne and the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf and Homo Novus’s relationship with the Latvian Deaf Association, was incredible. They were so excited. We had our little flash mob, this little test of it, and the passion from them blew me away. We had some fabulous experiences at a brilliant karaoke party you had last year. So we really hope to build on that this year as well. But I know that the deaf community in Latvia, so they’re telling me, are really passionate about the Homo Novus Festival. The warm embracing of their language and of their community onto the festival is a really beautiful, magnificent thing to see. I think that the community is so creative, so brilliant about performance. Sign language is a performance of language anyway, so it lends itself to public performance. So I think that we are just building on, and I’m very lucky to be coming in on it, your great passion for equality and diversity, and inclusion. And this is what makes festivals like Homo Novus so rich and so brilliant.

Santa: We were a bit shy to accept the award because we thought it’s just the first few little steps, just to open your door to a community. It shouldn’t get an award. It should just be a normal step for every country. One to not ostracise other people who live in the same city.

Amanda: This is what is so exciting – that you are really from a kind of a grassroots way, because, of course, nobody in the Latvian Association for the Deaf who was working with us are professional performers.

Santa: They look professional to me because the performance of language sometimes is so, I don’t know, perfect.

Amanda: Yeah, exactly! They’re not professionals, but, my goodness, they bring this beautiful performance and are full of heart, bursting to do it, really hungry to do it. The standard is much higher than for a community theatre.

Santa: Also the community theatre and all the different kinds of theatres, they are changing their roles, and they are emerging, appearing, surprising us. Let’s not spoil everything that people will be able to see in two weeks, approximately. I just wanted to ask one last question about this impressive scenography that you are bringing with those big boxes. All those shirts, what do they represent? What is this bright metaphor?

Amanda: There’s a line in the Ode to Joy that talks about the starry canopy. And, you know, maybe you could read it as a very religious thing. But this didn’t really interest us to put it in the religious context. What we wanted to talk about is the generations. Deaf people have been in the world since …, I think the first recording of a deaf person is Socrates in Ancient Greece, 1000s and 1000s of years ago. Sometimes when we look at deaf people, we want to fix them. We look at them as the medical model. But actually, if we just change our approach and look at them as a different community with a magnificent language. And we need to preserve the beautiful diversity of the human race. We need to preserve and enjoy the difference in languages and cultures in the world. We can’t be homogenous.
So it’s a canopy made of shirts, top clothing, old shirts. Everything is second hand from the second hand shops in Belfast.
In sign language when we talk about generations, it goes above you like this (shows with her palm above the head). And the way we talk about generations is it goes back, higher and higher above your head, it is literally the sign for the generations of people who went before us.
These shirts are very clearly for a body, and they hang over us. Some of the sleeves might hang down and touch us on the shoulder, on the top of the head. It is a symbol for the many, many generations of deaf people who have always been here and always will be with us in the future. We stand within this great maelstrom of wonderful Sign language users and deaf people. And so we are here, and we want to be included and equal, all men together.

Santa: Nice! Thank you! So I stop the recording here, and I hope people listen to it and come to witness it.

Amanda: Yes, please come! It will be very special. And to see a symphony and some music that we all know as hearing people so well, as you say, from TV talks, the oldest people in Latvia know the Ode to Joy so well, and to see it in a different context will be incredible.

Published in Satori.lv