I’ve just spent an hour and a half shortening and shortening an email to get it into a 500-character contact form.
It was an introductory email trying to describe this project and ask for advice all at the same time, and to shrink it I had to make all kinds of curious omissions and abbreviations while still keeping it friendly and unbrisk. I hope I didn’t go too far. It may be that I’ve just sent off a very very polite email that fails to say or ask anything at all. We’ll see when (if) I get a reply.
At this stage, the project’s been in my notebook for a good four or five months, and on the books of the Word Festival for at least two, and at last it’s sufficiently settled that I can start approaching collaborators.
Briefly, the performance will involve signing instructions and descriptions for the actions of a co-performer, who will be constructing a small but growing wire sculpture. It’s a small-scale project, with a handful of performers and just a single performance in Spring this year.
Crucial to the success of the work will be finding a collaborator who can share with me their expertise in the structure, detail and poetry of BSL. In my collaboration with Anthony the orchestra conductor of ‘Musica Practica’, having an idea for the work was a start, but it only really came together through careful and excitable discussion and the gradual piecing towards one another of originally disparate practices.
I’ve been informally interested in sign language since my linguistics degree many years ago, and I passed my Level 1 BSL Exam last summer – but Level 1 is a bit like a fairly elementary GCSE. I can ask you all about your pets and your brothers and sisters and what you have in your pencil case, but not very much more. And that’s on a good day. I have been known to forget the sign for hello. (I panic.) I’m still a complete beginner, and am well aware of the glaring gaps in my understanding of the underlying structures of the language.
So over the past few months I’ve been reading some research articles into the linguistic structure of BSL, most recently about deixis, metaphor, gender and sign order. I find these articles very exciting as a means to develop a broader sense of how the language works beyond the particularities of the individual signs and constructions I’ve learned.
I’ve also been finding out more about Deaf culture and how BSL fits in, and thinking about what it means for a hearing artist to devise a work involving BSL. What’s curious from this perspective is that my interest in the language is first of all formal, as is my interest in language as a whole:
BSL is exciting for me because of its physical phonology: where oral/aural languages use sound, sign languages use space. Much of my research involves grappling with the relationship between material and referential properties of language and text: Henri Chopin’s audiopoem Rouge seems to merge acoustic sound and physical form and almost obliterates meaning in the process; my line drawings take graphological marks off the page and make them directly touch, rather than describe, the things they name. Mallarmé, Broodthaers, John Barth, I think even Allan Kaprow deal with these ideas in one way or another. And in BSL the physical phonology of the language relates to the materiality of the world in ways that are quite unique and can’t be found in oral/aural language.
At the moment, then, I’m searching for a BSL user who shares this fascination with the structure of the language, as there’s so much I still don’t know. Known unknowns.
