Stage
Hands documents Tulsa theater company Grace Ann Productions' recent
staging of the musical Oliver!, which employed deaf and hearing
actors simultaneously performing in English and ASL (American Sign
Language).
All community theater productions spring from great effort and love,
and for Oliver! those efforts were doubled in order to present the
show seamlessly in both languages.
Using photography to record the ineffable process of an emerging
show is always a challenge—pictures can only capture the sounds
of theater indirectly. The fact that this production was performed
using a visual language gave me the opportunity to document speaking
and singing through sight. Through photographing the rehearsals,
I wanted to capture the energy that went into developing a show
that was both a typical amateur theater production and an unusual
collaboration between two communities on one stage. |
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