This was the opening scene of a landmark, limited-run revival of the musical Spring Awakening, where d/Deaf* actors were given the spotlight and their hearing counterparts acted as their vocal shadows. This integration of hearing and d/Deaf performers is what Artistic Sign Language (ASL) interpreter Landon Krentz and his team hope to achieve with Theatre Interpreting Services (TIS), a Vancouver-based company that helps theatre organizations gain exposure to d/Deaf culture and make theatre more accessible for the city’s d/Deaf population.

However, TIS is not your average interpretation service—it’s the only d/Deaf-owned business of its kind in Canada. “It’s important to have a d/ Deaf person to represent the d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community because of our understanding of our cultural values and ASL aesthetics,” said Krentz—one of six interpreters in TIS—in an email interview with This.

TIS interpreters—some of whom are also hearing—are specialized for theatre, which means their work involves much more artistry than simple translation. Rather than having a hearing interpreter stand off to the side of the stage and interpret on the fly, TIS interpreters must develop and rehearse an ASL version of the script. On top of that, Krentz says they like to encourage inclusive practices that allow for more artistic interpretations for d/Deaf audiences such as shadow interpreting, a method in which they follow actors around while performing ASL simultaneously.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to making theatre more accessible: most production companies usually don’t allocate budget for these deep-integration methods and often scramble to find interpreters for productions a month prior to performances, says Krentz.

“[Typically,] interpreters are expected to show up and disappear,” Krentz says. “This is not an authentic approach to adding artistic sign language stories on stage and often, d/Deaf people will notice a disconnect in synergy.”

To remedy this, the government offers funds through accessibility grants that can be used to bring interpreters in earlier in the production process, but Krentz said many theatre companies don’t know those funds are available.

“We have a social responsibility to people from our community to do this work and try to create these kind of important conversations within the Canadian theatre community,” said Krentz. “It is slowly on the rise.”

* This Magazine has stylized d/Deaf to be inclusive of all deafness on a spectrum

“Close Readings” by Christine Sun Kim on view in Sound Etiquette. Courtesy of Scott Kedy.

The sound of biting lips softly. The sound of bones cracking. The sound of a light that never flickers. What we hear depends on who we are.

These personal politics of sound are the focus of a challenging art exhibition in Halifax. Sound Etiquette explores the social conventions around sonic communication the hearing community might not often consider—how we speak and hear, who gets to be heard, and when we are listening. It features international media artists from Canada to the U.K. whose works convey how limiting and inaccessible speech and language norms can be.

Christine Sun Kim, one of the artists in the show, coined the term “sound etiquette,” which refers to the unspoken rules of the hearing world that Deaf people are expected to abide by. For Kim, an American sound artist who has been profoundly Deaf—unable to hear any sound—since birth, these expectations range from not slamming doors to not eating potato chips too loudly. The demands imposed by sound etiquette send a loud message to the artist: Navigate the hearing world quietly and discretely.

“All of these rules assume that Deaf people don’t also participate in the sonic landscape,” says Halifax-based curator Amanda Shore, who produced the show throughout a professional residency at the Halifax media arts organization the Centre for Art Tapes.

The presumption that Deaf people don’t have a relationship with sound means that, too often, only hearing people are deciding what content is translated for Deaf communities. In the interpretation process, sounds and meaning may be overlooked, overstated, or misrepresented. The Deaf viewer’s experience is filtered—dependent upon the perspective of the hearing captioner. “The multidimensionality of sound, or many layered sounds, are often reduced to brief captions,” writes Kim in an artist statement. “The captioner chooses which sounds to reference and which to leave out.”

Video still of “Close Readings” by Christine Sun Kim. Courtesy of artist and Carroll / Fletcher.

Kim shifts that dynamic in her work “Close Readings.” The piece consists of four screens showing popular film clips that resonate with the theme of voice, including Ghost, 2001: Space Odyssey, and The Little Mermaid. Four of Kim’s Deaf peers caption the clips and she gave her friends free reign to add whatever sound cues they wanted—literal, conceptual or abstract. They transcribe the scenes with observant, poetic captions: “soft, endearing sigh,” “the sound of blame,” and “the feeling of whiteness in the dark.” Kim softly blurs the images to encourage viewers to read the captions instead of watching and listening. “These beautiful moments that might normally get lost in translation are things that these captioners capture—like the sound of a kiss or changes in light,” says Shore. Hearing people who watch the videos encounter them through the perspectives of their hearing-impaired translators.

The other works featured in Sound Etiquette are even more abstract. Videos by Canadian artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay and British Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce explore language and voice as they intersect with gender, sexuality, and song. In Nemerofsky Ramsay’s video “The Last Song,” a man singing an operatic aria experiences a sudden vocal change, his voice transforming from adult baritone to youthful soprano. The performance confronts the viewer with notions of hormones, manliness, and the potential foreignness of our own voices. And in Boyce’s “Exquisite Cacophony,” a female vocalist and male rapper perform alongside one another in a 35-minute blur of slam poetry and incomprehensible babble. The piece is overwhelming, touching on challenging topics like gender norms and sexuality, then moving to another subject so quickly that language seems to unravel.

“The Last Song” by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay on view in Sound Etiquette. Courtesy of Scott Kedy.

Both Nemerofsky Ramsay and Boyce are hearing artists, so their work was not captioned. Shore felt it was important to centre Deaf audiences by translating all English audio, so she captioned Boyce’s work herself. “I knew that decision would be a bit of a risk because Kim’s piece is specifically critiquing hearing people captioning work for Deaf audiences,” she says. “But I prioritized the fact that I wanted to make this a show where Deaf audiences could experience every work in some way. I decided to take that risk in hopes that even if the captions seemed insufficient, it would actually enhance the message of Christine’s Sun Kim’s piece.”

Shore also reached out to Deaf Atlantic and the society of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Nova Scotians to promote the show. She had ASL interpreters translating her curator’s talk and she provided text materials for each work in the show. She says these types of accessibility measures are often overlooked in the art world: “I find now that my eyes have been open to this, I’ve been noticing that galleries are falling short, particularly when an exhibition is specifically about sound or video.”

Exquisite Cacophony by Sonia Boyce MBE on view in Sound Etiquette. Courtesy of Scott Kedy.

That said, there are a handful of Deaf art groups in the country leading the way. In Quebec, Deaf theatre collective Spill.PROpagation is performing in French, English, American Sign Language (ASL), and la Langue des signes québécoise (LSQ). In London, Ont., Vibra Fusion Lab is a collective led by Deaf artists using technology to create wearable pieces that translate sound into vibrations.

Shore hopes other arts institutions follow suit, making exhibitions accessible to hearing-impaired audiences, even if a Deaf artist isn’t featured. “I think it’s a big problem that we only think about these things as arts professionals when we’re held accountable in the work,” she says. “It should be something we think about through all of the shows.”’

This was not my experience. When the sound was turned on at age 24, it caused physical and emotional discomfort. It shook my world. I spent the next few days sleeping in the closet, because it was a small, dark, and womb-like space where I felt safe. My reality and perception of the world—and myself— had been forever changed.

Throughout my life I’ve been hearing, hard-of-hearing, and now, deaf. I was diagnosed with a profound high-tone hearing loss at age 10 with my first hearing test. The reason for hearing loss is not always known. In my case, after ruling out meningitis, the hearing loss was assumed to be the result of a severe throat and ear infection I had from tonsillitis when I was 3.

Accommodations, such as hearing aids and cochlear implants, enable people with hearing loss to function more easily, allowing opportunity through enhanced access with the goal of equality. However, equality is often translated as the need for normalcy, or to fit in. It is here, in this grey zone, the gifts of differently abled people go unnoticed and society is robbed from the benefits of understanding, appreciating, and nourishing otherness.

The grey zone, and the struggle that exists within it, is real. I grew up in the Saskatchewan public school system, where oralism is the preferred approach to hearing loss. This is an archaic and damaging belief system created in the 1800s by Alexander Graham Bell, which promotes removing access to sign language and taking an oral-only approach.

When a person who is deaf or hard-of-hearing is pushed to acclimate to the hearing world with no other options, it prohibits room for exploration of their hearing loss— an intrinsic part of what guides their relationship with the external world—and runs the risk of creating a false or confused self-identity when all they have for points of comparison are people who are hearing, who are not like them.

This one-way approach—the push for me to hear—led me to dismiss my hearing loss as I was growing up. After diagnosis, the focus from audiologists was purely on “fixing” the hearing “problem” with hearing aids that didn’t work. I hid them in the furthest, darkest corner of my bottom dresser drawer.

It was only when I accepted my hearing loss in my teens and 20s that I started coming into focus. I was old enough to understand who I was, not in spite of my hearing loss but because of it. I saw the gifts I had gained: a deep sensitivity, empathy, and compassion; a tendency to read body language to see what’s truly being communicated; and noticing an incredible depth of detail in the external world through my eyes. So, when I received my cochlear implant at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles, my sense of self was threatened—Will I lose who I am if I’m able to hear?

I learned my speech perception was only 25 percent, a fact I had missed due to my ability to read lips with 99 percent accuracy. This led to a long journey in coming to terms with how much I must have missed in the moments when my back was turned, a fact I had been ignorant to. The cochlear implant brought my speech perception up to 75 percent and I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders: I didn’t have to rely on lip reading so much to get by. Not having to focus as much on this exhausting task allowed me to turn the lens inward and start to get to know myself in a deeper way.

In 2012, in my early 30s, I found out I’d lost the rest of my hearing. Once again, the reason for this hearing loss was unknown. But, rather than being filled with grief, I accepted it. I discovered the Deaf community, sign language, and peers in Saskatchewan. I thought, I’ve found my people.

Yet, the more I tried to identify with the culture, and with an intensely difficult struggle to learn and retain sign language, I felt increasingly helpless and filled with sorrow.

After years of being confused about where I belonged, I realized the belief that I needed to choose between the hearing and Deaf community was a detriment. Instead, I chose both. I would honour myself as an individual and make connections in all communities. I realized I didn’t need to identify zealously with a particular community or the boundaries of a label. Most importantly, making the choice to stand firm in my authenticity and individuality allowed me to realize this: I am not a deaf woman. I am a woman who happens to be deaf. The person—the humanity, the heart—comes first.

When we make ourselves small, defined within the challenges of a condition, we surrender our authenticity. When we aim to fit in and be like others, or force others to be like us to appease our comfort zone, we throw away the chance to share and experience the magic of unique perspectives. Learning to see myself beyond the limitations of deafness has allowed me to see others beyond what meets the eye. We do not have to be limited in our experience of ourselves, or the world, simply because we have a condition that limits us.