THE MOVIE
The Silent Theatre is the place where the community of the deaf and hearing people meets and combine images and words, noises and vibrations, music and silence to live the same place, the theatre as the art of the bodies exposed to the viewers’ eyes. This art, for those who act, is created through a world of images, words and experiences invisible to viewers.
The task of the actor is that of making visible the invisible.
The daily life of the hearing-impaired flows between the passage from the invisible to the visible.
The Silent Theatre is a story about the theatre explored through the actor’s relationships with the intimate dimension of his/her work and with the evocative power of the images created to tell a story. We started from the experience of a show to explore this lonely and secret land, where some of us have worked (Lear, produced by the National Theatre of Tuscany), to continue the discovery of the silent life that fed the show and to share its world with the people who live in silence since birth.
The Silent Theatre is the place where the actor Savino Paparella (Edgar in Lear) meets Nicola Della Maggiora a young deaf actor who has seen in the theatre the possibility of personal growth and transformation.
The actress Silvia Pasello accompanies their meeting. We asked Silvia to show her daily itinerary that made possible to realize “the creature” who in the perfomance that goes under the name of Lear.
The stories of Silvia, Nicola and Savino can show the relationship between the theatre and the world of the hearing-impaired beyond the borders of a show that does not use sound while the hearing people can cross the threshold of the “perfomance” of that silent community who sometimes we meet on our way.
THE PROJECT
The Silent Theatre project was started with the formation of group of hearing-impaired people that watched pictures and movies without subtitles and whom we observed for their reactions and reflections. The comments, reports and notes provided by this “work session” have created a list of possibilities that will be used in the dramaturgy and in the movie tale by images.
The group is formed by deep guardians of a deafness called “community”. The knowledge of their “view of things”, their uses, their social structure, their sense of belonging, their norms of behavior and, first and foremost, Signs Language, are the premises for making a movie story that gives access to a dimension where stories and tales express the characteristics of this “ethnicity”: space organization, linguistic use of the face expression, perception of sound and noise through the vibrant body, visual construction of the dialogue.
The project is divided into three parts:
Thanks to the patronage of the Center for Experimental and Theatrical Research - National Theater of Tuscany, the first part of the project will take place during a residence at the Era Theatre where the authors of the project and the group of deaf people will be present. The opportunity to enter the intimacy of theatrical rehearsal will be offered everyone, in the personal dimension of the work of all participants, to cross many times the border that divides everyday life from the theatrical environment.
The collected visual material and the reflections on this communal experience will form the basis for a collective meeting at the Columbus classroom of Roma Tre University. On this occasion we will find the junctions around which to begin to pull the threads of the tale by images and the plan for further filming.
After completing the filming, in the third part we will write the screenplay and make the first film editing. This material will be watched by external witnesses: directors, actors and the group of hearing-impaired. Their reactions and reflections will suggest the course to follow for the definitive elaboration of The Silent Theatre movie.
THE STORY
The Silent Theatre project was born from the meeting between the theatre and the Signs Language, between the world of the deaf and the world of hearing people in the university course ‘Theatre History’ taught by Stefano Geraci at Roma Tre University’s former Department of DAMS (currently, Filosofia, Comunicazione e Spettacolo), where Antonella Fruguglietti has worked for a long time as interpreter of the Signs Language for deaf students.
This collaboration was started on two premises: accessibility on the part of deaf people and the potentiality for expression of the Signs Language. The actual experiences and reflections that came out suggested that this project could break the limits of the theatre for the hearing people, which is translated into Signs Language, thus preventing the discovery of the expressive ways used by the deaf community, a powerful force that can change words, sounds, noises, time and space in eloquent pictures even for the hearing people.
The necessity to show the potential of the relationship between the hearing and the deaf beyond the borders imposed by the translation into Signs Language is materialized in the project The Silent Theatre movie.
The reasons of this choice are many:
1. Italy is one of the few countries in the world that has not recognized the Signs Language with serious consequences on the deaf autonomy and causing a slowdown in the evolution of learning methods for the deaf. Every place of social and cultural life is forbidden to the deaf, who are often subjects for research and medical study, but who are rarely protagonists of autonomous choices. Movies without subtitles, inaccessible events, theatres, exhibitions force the deaf to live in a world closed to the exchange and enrichment through “other” experiences and points of view.
The Silent Theatre wants to create an opportunity where the hearing world and the deaf world can meet with equal rights and discover a unique community of viewers.
2. The production of The Silent Theatre movie aims at national and international diffusion through programming in theatre and cinema circuits to open up the way to a different social inclusion of the deaf community in the venues of the production and presentation of the movie.
