Last weekend I went to the Drill Hall in London for a matinee performance of four plays written and performed in BSL by Deafinitely Theatre. Particularly engaging for me was the continuous bilingualism that went on throughout.
The plays all incorporated surtitles projected above the stage, but the written English was used in a number of ways over the course of the evening. The words served not just to translate BSL into English but to describe music and sound effects, to show the content of a document being read silently on stage, and even to indicate private thoughts that remained unsigned. In all of these cases certain ideas and components of the productions existed for the entire audience only in English.
There was abundant bilingualism among the characters too: certain characters signed and spoke in turn, many did not use English at all, some used only English and needed other characters as interpreters, one character could not sign but didn’t speak either, communicating instead in non-BSL gestures. There’s a great amount of play you can do when you anticipate a bilingual audience, and when a shared language is such an important part of community identity.
During the interval I found myself sitting with some other BSL learners who were training for the Level 1 exam I passed a couple of years ago, and I was startled by how comprehensively I’ve forgotten what I’d learned. Bad. I felt like a complete beginner again. Since then I’ve been practising with RNID resources online and in print in advance of the BSL poetry reading in Bristol next weekend. Though I don’t expect to understand a great deal of what’s being signed, at least I’ll be able to say hello without panic.
