How do the deaf and hearing-impaired experience music?

DW (English)

How do the deaf experience music or even make music? A project in Lithuania brings hearing and the deaf together on stage.

Transcript

00:01Dance, poetry, music.

00:03You don't have to be able to hear to express yourself artistically.

00:07How do deaf people feel and perform music?

00:10And what can someone with typical hearing learn from the deaf community?

00:15The musical project called Not What We Agreed, based in Lithuania,

00:20brought the hearing impaired and hearing communities together to create art.

00:24Marker Vorohemo, better known as Signmark, is a deaf rap artist from Finland.

00:29He works with the Lithuanian deaf community and consults the performers.

00:33Marker's international career wouldn't have been successful if he had followed the critics' advice.

00:40Around me there were people who would say,

00:43Oh, the way you sign looks so cool, since they had never seen that.

00:48And I thought, there has to be something special here.

00:53But they've said to me it's better to pick another dream.

00:59Nina is another member of the ensemble.

01:01She's also deaf and has always dreamed of writing poetry.

01:05Now she performs her own poem on stage, highlighting everyday struggles.

01:10When I approach hearing people and tell them I'm deaf, they get extremely lost.

01:19It seems to put a mountain between us.

01:22But it is possible to gesticulate somehow, to figure out what to do next, and it can be done together.

01:29But when the hearing person is lost, I can't do anything to get close, there's a wall between us.

01:34Music is an integral part of Nina's life too.

01:42It brings me peace and relaxes my thoughts.

01:45Amid the daily stress of work, I have music.

01:49I can choose from a range of moods.

01:51Sad, happy and everything in between.

01:54Vilius is another performer.

01:57He was born deaf, but from an early age, he was fascinated by music.

02:02So he begged his mother to buy him an accordion and started learning to play.

02:08The teacher said it'd be impossible to teach a deaf person.

02:12Tears began rolling down my face.

02:14The teacher shook his head and had a long talk with my mother.

02:17Finally he asked me to try to get the rhythm.

02:19One, two, three, one.

02:21Unfortunately, sometimes Vilius wasn't allowed to play or speak in sign language.

02:28These sad experiences are documented in his performance.

02:37Lithuanian actor and singer Dominikus Vajcikunis is the driving force behind the Not What We Agreed project,

02:44which brings together the beauty of sign language, poetry and music.

02:47We tried to just translate spoken language, but it didn't work correctly.

02:57So we started to create everything in sign language.

03:00And then I started to translate in Lithuanian language.

03:04And then we started to combine those methods.

03:08So this performance is about finding the ways how we can create together without dominating each other's language.

03:22There were those who wanted Dominikus to design this project solely for the deaf community and exclude hearing people.

03:29I said no. And I think that's the problem, how we think.

03:35We think that we need to specify the audiences and to do specials for them.

03:41And this is aggression. This is power position, how we look at people.

03:44Rapper Signmark works together with Dominikus in rehearsals.

03:50He travels around the world to connect with deaf communities.

03:53If I'm performing for deaf people, I can offer them the culture and deeper meanings within the culture

04:02and language that hearing people might not experience or understand the same way.

04:07I try to communicate it through facial expressions, my body, gestures and hands.

04:12But hearing people don't understand that. All they see is, oh, cool signs.

04:23Not what we agreed is not a conventional performance.

04:27The audience might be asked to take off their shoes and even hold a balloon between their palms to feel the vibrations.

04:34So how does the audience like it?

04:35It was really interesting to me to see that they could actually feel music in a different way.

04:43And I found that really interesting that actually music brings us all together.

04:47It's a very meaningful project for both communities.

04:51Hearing people can understand what deafness is and how these people feel.

04:55These performers from Lithuania show us how music can be experienced in unexpected ways.

05:00They also prove that obstacles mainly exist in our heads.

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