Lumina, SOUND OFF 2024. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

SOUND OFF, the influential national festival unique in the country and the continent, is back, and here in its hometown, for an eighth annual edition Tuesday.

The brainchild of Chris Dodd, SOUND OFF is dedicated to Deaf performing arts and artists, accessible and welcoming to both Deaf and hearing audiences. And the term groundbreaking doesn’t go amiss in the six-day multi-disciplinary multi-lingual (ASL and English) festivities.

This year’s edition includes six live in-person mainstage performances, two online shows, workshops, panel discussions. We caught up with the multi-faceted festival founder and artistic director — actor/improviser, playwright/ director/ activist — to find out more about range of featured SOUND OFF artists, from Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec.

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Each year a theme or pattern magically emerges from the multiple cross-country submissions. “Last year it was Deaf dance,” says Dodd. “We collaborated with mainstream dance company, Dance Novella from Vancouver, as well as our home-grown (dance/theatre) show Carbon Movements with Ainsley Hillyard and Connor Yuzwenko-Martin. In addition, we also had a hearing and Deaf collaborative movement group, roots2reach, who led a workshop.”

This year? Dodd says the submissions leaned into personal stories transmuted into theatre and told onstage. Speaking Vibrations, in which four women connect and discover a way to convey their stories, is SOUND OFF’s first partnership with the SkirtsAfire Festival.

“Speaking Vibrations and Disorder are both very personal works,” Dodd says, “reflecting upon the lived experiences for the artists. Even more so for But The Truth Is, billed as “a compelling portrayal of the Deaf experience, focusing on the challenges and triumphs faced by the Deaf community in their daily lives.”

Dodd describes Speaking Vibrations, as “a multi-disciplinary show with built-in accessibility from the ground up: it will have captions, ASL, voice-over, along with audio description and the use of vibrotactile (technology).” As with Carbon Movements, the fascinating experiment of last year, this involves Woojer belts that sync with the music and sounds of the performance, for an interactive experience.”

The inspiration, as in last year’s show, is that the Deaf and hearing audiences could share the same theatrical experience. The “creative captions” are designed to “make them more alive,” by which Dodd means that “the captions tell story as much as they narrate it.”

But the Truth Is, as Dodd describes, is an eight-artist collaboration of three Deaf professional company: Dancing Hands Theatre, 258 Signs Productions, and Adeline. They were the creators of Fernando and His Llama, a hit at last year’s festival. This new production, says Dodd, targets more mature audiences, “and is a testament to the strength and creativity within the Deaf community, fostering greater awareness and appreciation for their unique journey.”

The protagonist of The Red Rose Bleeds, a wealthy Deaf serial killer, is a dab hand with a cleaver and revenge on her mind. Which should be a tip-off that this solo piece by Gaitrie Persaud is a real original, and runs dark, noir and beyond. SOUND OFF audiences will remember the Toronto-based creator and star, who runs her own performance company Phoenix the Fire, from last year’s dark, spiky comedy The Two Natashas.

“The show promises to be bold, dark, audacious and also very entertaining,” says Dodd. “The story draws from Gaitrie’s own personal experiences when she was younger.” The character is fuelled by a sense of personal justice. SOUND OFF is the show’s debut and I am very much looking forward to seeing how it evolves beyond this festival.”

Disorder, SOUND OFF 2024. Photo supplied

Disorder, as Dodd describes, is “a dance/movement show featuring ASL and voice-over, led by a hard of hearing and Deaf dancer duo from Montreal.” And, set on the frontier between the written word and the spatial language of ASL, it immerses us in their lived experiences, the one involving language and the other a more poetic and perhaps more expressive physicality.

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Dodd, whose own solo show Deafy (in 2023 the first play by a Deaf playwright to be produced on the Citadel MainStage in 58 seasons) explores the complex challenges of life in the Deaf world, appreciates the insights of Disorder. As he says, “Deaf identity is complex and very much a spectrum of your use of sign language, use of speech, level of involvement within the Deaf community. There is no one way of being Deaf or deaf. So it’s up to each of us to navigate our own personal journey within both the Deaf and hearing worlds.”

And there’s comedy! Lumina, an entirely wordless physical theatre show, stars five clowns from Montreal led by veteran clown Marie-Pierre Petit, at SOUND OFF last year as half the duo Pafolie and Jaclo.

And as per SOUND OFF comedy tradition, the festival continues its collaboration with the Edmonton’s Rapid Fire Theatre. Deaf/hearing improv is a perennial favourite with audiences. Maestro: SOUND OFF Edition happens online; Theatresports: SOUND OFF Edition happens live on the Westbury stage. As Dodd has said, when language is removed, both ASL and English, the Deaf improvisers invariably prove formidable physical comedians.

The digital lineup includes Mark of a Woman, by the British/Japanese Deaf artist Chisata Minamimura. Her Scored in Silence, about the lingering horrors of Hiroshima on the Deaf community there, was a highlight of the 2021 SOUND OFF. Minamimura’s new play, says Dodd, “is about celebrating and exploring personal histories and authentic accounts of the undertold relationships between women and tattooing cultures…. Chisata has a very unique artistic style of combining live performance with digital projects and it is a must-watch.”

 Dodd is encouraged that “more companies in Edmonton are waking up to the value of having ASL interpreted shows. The Fringe has been doing a wonderful job with ensuring that the year-round programming they bring in has interpretation. Another excellent example is the Free Will Players’ Twelfth Night last summer, which offered ASL interpretation for the first time in their 34 year history.

Concrete Theatre’s Songs My Mother Never Sung Me, with its ensemble of Deaf and hearing actors is, as Dodd puts it, “a beautiful example of what you can do when you incorporate integrated accessibility from the very beginning.”

As for Dodd’s Deafy, recently at MT Space in Kitchener for the IMPACT Festival and Vancouver’s PI Theatre, its travelling life continues. It’s part of Victoria’s Incoming Festival in April, with more dates to come. And Deafy goes international with a run in The Hague in the Netherlands in the fall. And the playwright is  working on “a new large-cast script,” to be honed at the Banff Playwrights Lab next month.

He emphasizes that SOUND OFF is for both Deaf and hearing audiences. “We want to act as a bridge connecting these two communities together.”

SOUND OFF 2024

Where: Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Tuesday through March 10

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. All mainstage shows are pay-what-you-can