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Theater students learn sign acting -- Newsday.com
Eileen Dulen-Jennings watched and waited. She stood in the background as a group of Housatonic Community College theater students walked in circles in the college's Performing Arts Center.
The students, meanwhile, were poised and alert. They, too, were waiting _ waiting for instructions. And then, suddenly, the instructions came.
"Anger!" commanded Dulen-Jennings.
The students then dutifully morphed their bodies into expressions of rage, assuming fight stances, clenching fists and otherwise conveying intense vexation. A pleased Dulen-Jennings regarded them. Then, she had them repeat the exercise, this time using only their faces to express anger. The students again complied, furrowing brows, clenching teeth and transforming their faces into masks of fury.
The last step was for the students to convey anger using only their hands. The fists came out again. Those whose hands weren't clenched in rage extended their fingers like claws, ready to reach out and pick apart the source of their extreme displeasure.
To the uninitiated, this might have seemed like a fairly typical acting exercise, intended to encourage the students to use their bodies as a tool on stage. And that was Dulen-Jennings' intention, but her little game had a deeper purpose as well.
Dulen-Jennings is a sign language storyteller, and has been for about 15 years, using words and gestures to entertain and inform students. She was at HCC for the latest installment of the college's Third Thursday Cultural Celebration series.
During each academic month, the Theater Arts program hosts a performing artist representing a specific culture. This month's program focused on the Culture of the Deaf, and spotlighted how sign language can be used not just as a method of communication, but also as a form of artistic expression.
Associate theater professor Geoffrey Sheehan spearheaded the Third Thursday program, and said it's been going on for six or seven years. The goal, he said, is give students more opportunities to perform, and to expose them to different cultures.
When he started the program, the "cultures" explored were predominantly ethnic, such as those of Mexico or Eastern Europe. But, after a few years, Sheehan said "we established a broader definition of what a culture is." Next month, for instance, will focus on the Culture of Women, and the month after that will highlight the Culture of the Environment.
Each Third Thursday guest conducts a workshop with the students, and helps them to prepare a theater piece, which is performed that evening. This is the second time Sheehan has spotlighted the culture of the deaf. He said Dulen-Jennings participated in Third Thursday a few years ago and was a big hit.
"The students loved it," he said. "They had no idea sign language could be an art form."
Though Dulen-Jennings is not deaf, she has worked with the hearing impaired for a number of years, including at the Theatre of the Deaf in Chicago. She now teaches at both the Greater Hartford Academy for the Arts and the Greater Hartford Academy of Mathematics and Science.
There's a certain poetry to sign language that most people don't notice, Dulen-Jennings said. Often, she told the students, there is but a single sign for certain concepts, such as anger, whereas there can be several spoken words for the same idea. People who rely on sign language to communicate frequently have to use their face and body as well as their hands to fully convey what they mean.
To illustrate the role of full-body communication in sign language, she had the students do the above exercise with a variety of emotions, including not just anger, but also happiness and exhaustion. After the students expressed these emotions with body, face and hands, she taught them the sign for each word.
Next, Dulen-Jennings demonstrated how to express more complicated concepts, such as poetry, without words. She had the students break into groups, and handed them a sheet of haikus. Each group had to act out the poems using only their bodies. The haikus focused mainly on nature, and the exercise forced the students to act out such concepts as bursting bubbles, blossoming flowers and splashing water.
The last exercise in the workshop had the class acting out the classic story "The House that Jack Built" using a combination of gestures and sign language. That was the piece the students performed that evening.
Following the workshop, many of the students said they found the experience eye-opening, including Megan Sego, 19, of Bridgeport. Sego said the program showed how infinite the world of artistic expression is. "I loved how you didn't have to use words to tell a story," she said.
Amber Hancock, 20, of Trumbull, agreed. Hancock said one of her aunts is deaf, so she has some familiarity with sign language, but Dulen-Jennings' program exposed her to a whole other side of it.
"I hadn't been exposed to sign language like that, in an interpretative way, before," she said. "I think it was beautiful."
Eileen Dulen-Jennings watched and waited. She stood in the background as a group of Housatonic Community College theater students walked in circles in the college's Performing Arts Center.
The students, meanwhile, were poised and alert. They, too, were waiting _ waiting for instructions. And then, suddenly, the instructions came.
"Anger!" commanded Dulen-Jennings.
The students then dutifully morphed their bodies into expressions of rage, assuming fight stances, clenching fists and otherwise conveying intense vexation. A pleased Dulen-Jennings regarded them. Then, she had them repeat the exercise, this time using only their faces to express anger. The students again complied, furrowing brows, clenching teeth and transforming their faces into masks of fury.
The last step was for the students to convey anger using only their hands. The fists came out again. Those whose hands weren't clenched in rage extended their fingers like claws, ready to reach out and pick apart the source of their extreme displeasure.
To the uninitiated, this might have seemed like a fairly typical acting exercise, intended to encourage the students to use their bodies as a tool on stage. And that was Dulen-Jennings' intention, but her little game had a deeper purpose as well.
Dulen-Jennings is a sign language storyteller, and has been for about 15 years, using words and gestures to entertain and inform students. She was at HCC for the latest installment of the college's Third Thursday Cultural Celebration series.
During each academic month, the Theater Arts program hosts a performing artist representing a specific culture. This month's program focused on the Culture of the Deaf, and spotlighted how sign language can be used not just as a method of communication, but also as a form of artistic expression.
Associate theater professor Geoffrey Sheehan spearheaded the Third Thursday program, and said it's been going on for six or seven years. The goal, he said, is give students more opportunities to perform, and to expose them to different cultures.
When he started the program, the "cultures" explored were predominantly ethnic, such as those of Mexico or Eastern Europe. But, after a few years, Sheehan said "we established a broader definition of what a culture is." Next month, for instance, will focus on the Culture of Women, and the month after that will highlight the Culture of the Environment.
Each Third Thursday guest conducts a workshop with the students, and helps them to prepare a theater piece, which is performed that evening. This is the second time Sheehan has spotlighted the culture of the deaf. He said Dulen-Jennings participated in Third Thursday a few years ago and was a big hit.
"The students loved it," he said. "They had no idea sign language could be an art form."
Though Dulen-Jennings is not deaf, she has worked with the hearing impaired for a number of years, including at the Theatre of the Deaf in Chicago. She now teaches at both the Greater Hartford Academy for the Arts and the Greater Hartford Academy of Mathematics and Science.
There's a certain poetry to sign language that most people don't notice, Dulen-Jennings said. Often, she told the students, there is but a single sign for certain concepts, such as anger, whereas there can be several spoken words for the same idea. People who rely on sign language to communicate frequently have to use their face and body as well as their hands to fully convey what they mean.
To illustrate the role of full-body communication in sign language, she had the students do the above exercise with a variety of emotions, including not just anger, but also happiness and exhaustion. After the students expressed these emotions with body, face and hands, she taught them the sign for each word.
Next, Dulen-Jennings demonstrated how to express more complicated concepts, such as poetry, without words. She had the students break into groups, and handed them a sheet of haikus. Each group had to act out the poems using only their bodies. The haikus focused mainly on nature, and the exercise forced the students to act out such concepts as bursting bubbles, blossoming flowers and splashing water.
The last exercise in the workshop had the class acting out the classic story "The House that Jack Built" using a combination of gestures and sign language. That was the piece the students performed that evening.
Following the workshop, many of the students said they found the experience eye-opening, including Megan Sego, 19, of Bridgeport. Sego said the program showed how infinite the world of artistic expression is. "I loved how you didn't have to use words to tell a story," she said.
Amber Hancock, 20, of Trumbull, agreed. Hancock said one of her aunts is deaf, so she has some familiarity with sign language, but Dulen-Jennings' program exposed her to a whole other side of it.
"I hadn't been exposed to sign language like that, in an interpretative way, before," she said. "I think it was beautiful."