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All-access jazz | Philadelphia Daily News | 11/12/2007
ADMITTEDLY, IT CAN be overwhelming: A singer in a wheelchair scats while her quintet jams behind her; a sign-language interpreter translates music and lyrics into body language while an LED screen scrolls the lyrics and dialogue; an artist paints the music onto a huge canvas; and an audio describer attempts to explain it all.
But that's one of the messages behind JazzArtSigns, the singer, Lisa Thorson, said of her multimedia show. It's designed to be accessible to people with disabilities, but that can make it disorienting for audience members who have all their senses intact.
"There's a couple of places where the hearing audience are left out," Thorson said. "And I've heard people say they felt really uncomfortable in that moment. I say, 'Yeah, that's how a deaf person feels when there's no interpreter.' "
That shared experience is one of Thorson's primary goals in mounting JazzArtSigns, which comes to Philly next Monday as part of the inaugural Independence Starts Here festival of disability in the arts.
The idea for the show came when Thorson, who has used a wheelchair since a 1979 fall, struggled to figure out a way to continue performing.
"I was doing a lot of musical theater at the time of my injury," Thorson explained. "So I started experimenting with incorporating different kinds of music into an act, and I got completely flipped on jazz - hooked on the music, on the people, on the spirit of improvisation, on the challenge of trying to do anything that you can with your voice."
Over the years, Thorson was approached often to perform at disability-focused events, with a sign-language interpreter to translate lyrics. Eventually, though, she began to feel restricted.
She decided to create her own piece using the concept of universal design, which addresses accessibility issues in a way that incorporates all audiences. Then Thorson discovered Nancy Ostrovsky, an artist who had been painting live with improvising musicians since the early 1970s. In Ostrovsky's work, Thorson saw a way to bring improvised music to a hearing-impaired audience.
"When you perform live, you can feel the audience," Ostrovsky said of the JazzArtSigns experience. Interpreting music by painting, Ostrovsky explained, is a way for her to be "part of the band."
"There's something about improvised music that doesn't let you pretend," she said. "For me, the movement and responding to it has a kind of honesty. The improvisational element of being in the moment is a life teaching: You try and be as present as possible no matter what you're doing."
For American Sign Language interpreter Jody Steiner, signing and performing have always gone hand in hand. In her freshman year of college, Steiner attended a performance by the National Theatre of the Deaf, a Connecticut-based touring company composed of deaf and hearing actors. Fascinated, she "kind of became a groupie."
After graduation, Steiner auditioned for the company and was hired as a "walkie-talkie," speaking lines that the deaf actors signed. "I was hired without really knowing sign language and learned on the job," she recalled.
Steiner later relocated to Boston, where she got involved as an interpreter/actor with a theater for disabled and able-bodied performers that Thorson had co-founded. The two have been friends ever since.
"As her work evolved and she became more and more into jazz," Steiner said of Thorson, "we both realized that it wasn't very interpretable. When the songs are more lyrical, more story-oriented, they're more interesting to a deaf audience. When it's music and scatting and soloing among instruments, it's visually not as interesting. So I started doing different things and her jazz started taking off."
When JazzArtSigns came into existence, then, Steiner was the obvious choice as the show's American Sign Language interpreter. Besides signing the lyrics that Thorson sings, Steiner represents the music kinesthetically, varying the strength of her signs and using different parts of her body for different instruments.
Thorson carefully selects her repertoire to reflect the larger concept of the show.
"A lot of the lyrics have something to do with people coming together," she said. "I picked lyrics that had to do with unity or struggle or conflict, because that's what I feel like the piece is about. If you came to just see a regular jazz gig that I do, maybe some of that is in there, maybe not. But in this particular case, I felt like everything needed to have more of a message than 'My Funny Valentine.' "
Due to the difficulty and expense of staging JazzArtSigns, Thorson and her ensemble typically perform the show about once a year, but all involved expressed their enthusiasm for the experience.
Steiner recalled an audience member who approached her following a performance in Portsmouth, N.H., accompanied by her deaf father.
"She was a music lover, and it was something she could never share with her father. She brought him to JazzArtSigns and they both had tears in their eyes. He got a little sense of what she loved, and he felt equal sitting in the audience.
"I don't have any illusion that I'm providing 100-percent access to jazz. But what does come out of these evenings is a chance to bridge the gap just a little bit, and in a way that can be really joyous."
That purpose fuels Thorson as well, but she also explains the show in terms that any jazz performer would recognize.
"It's a strange thing that jazz is considered an American art form and there's a lot of reverence for it, but there's not a huge listening public," she said. "So it's important to get as many audience members as we can get hooked into the music, to understand it better and to enjoy it." *
ADMITTEDLY, IT CAN be overwhelming: A singer in a wheelchair scats while her quintet jams behind her; a sign-language interpreter translates music and lyrics into body language while an LED screen scrolls the lyrics and dialogue; an artist paints the music onto a huge canvas; and an audio describer attempts to explain it all.
But that's one of the messages behind JazzArtSigns, the singer, Lisa Thorson, said of her multimedia show. It's designed to be accessible to people with disabilities, but that can make it disorienting for audience members who have all their senses intact.
"There's a couple of places where the hearing audience are left out," Thorson said. "And I've heard people say they felt really uncomfortable in that moment. I say, 'Yeah, that's how a deaf person feels when there's no interpreter.' "
That shared experience is one of Thorson's primary goals in mounting JazzArtSigns, which comes to Philly next Monday as part of the inaugural Independence Starts Here festival of disability in the arts.
The idea for the show came when Thorson, who has used a wheelchair since a 1979 fall, struggled to figure out a way to continue performing.
"I was doing a lot of musical theater at the time of my injury," Thorson explained. "So I started experimenting with incorporating different kinds of music into an act, and I got completely flipped on jazz - hooked on the music, on the people, on the spirit of improvisation, on the challenge of trying to do anything that you can with your voice."
Over the years, Thorson was approached often to perform at disability-focused events, with a sign-language interpreter to translate lyrics. Eventually, though, she began to feel restricted.
She decided to create her own piece using the concept of universal design, which addresses accessibility issues in a way that incorporates all audiences. Then Thorson discovered Nancy Ostrovsky, an artist who had been painting live with improvising musicians since the early 1970s. In Ostrovsky's work, Thorson saw a way to bring improvised music to a hearing-impaired audience.
"When you perform live, you can feel the audience," Ostrovsky said of the JazzArtSigns experience. Interpreting music by painting, Ostrovsky explained, is a way for her to be "part of the band."
"There's something about improvised music that doesn't let you pretend," she said. "For me, the movement and responding to it has a kind of honesty. The improvisational element of being in the moment is a life teaching: You try and be as present as possible no matter what you're doing."
For American Sign Language interpreter Jody Steiner, signing and performing have always gone hand in hand. In her freshman year of college, Steiner attended a performance by the National Theatre of the Deaf, a Connecticut-based touring company composed of deaf and hearing actors. Fascinated, she "kind of became a groupie."
After graduation, Steiner auditioned for the company and was hired as a "walkie-talkie," speaking lines that the deaf actors signed. "I was hired without really knowing sign language and learned on the job," she recalled.
Steiner later relocated to Boston, where she got involved as an interpreter/actor with a theater for disabled and able-bodied performers that Thorson had co-founded. The two have been friends ever since.
"As her work evolved and she became more and more into jazz," Steiner said of Thorson, "we both realized that it wasn't very interpretable. When the songs are more lyrical, more story-oriented, they're more interesting to a deaf audience. When it's music and scatting and soloing among instruments, it's visually not as interesting. So I started doing different things and her jazz started taking off."
When JazzArtSigns came into existence, then, Steiner was the obvious choice as the show's American Sign Language interpreter. Besides signing the lyrics that Thorson sings, Steiner represents the music kinesthetically, varying the strength of her signs and using different parts of her body for different instruments.
Thorson carefully selects her repertoire to reflect the larger concept of the show.
"A lot of the lyrics have something to do with people coming together," she said. "I picked lyrics that had to do with unity or struggle or conflict, because that's what I feel like the piece is about. If you came to just see a regular jazz gig that I do, maybe some of that is in there, maybe not. But in this particular case, I felt like everything needed to have more of a message than 'My Funny Valentine.' "
Due to the difficulty and expense of staging JazzArtSigns, Thorson and her ensemble typically perform the show about once a year, but all involved expressed their enthusiasm for the experience.
Steiner recalled an audience member who approached her following a performance in Portsmouth, N.H., accompanied by her deaf father.
"She was a music lover, and it was something she could never share with her father. She brought him to JazzArtSigns and they both had tears in their eyes. He got a little sense of what she loved, and he felt equal sitting in the audience.
"I don't have any illusion that I'm providing 100-percent access to jazz. But what does come out of these evenings is a chance to bridge the gap just a little bit, and in a way that can be really joyous."
That purpose fuels Thorson as well, but she also explains the show in terms that any jazz performer would recognize.
"It's a strange thing that jazz is considered an American art form and there's a lot of reverence for it, but there's not a huge listening public," she said. "So it's important to get as many audience members as we can get hooked into the music, to understand it better and to enjoy it." *