Deaf Culture of Dance: Movement Tools using ASL Dance
This work incorporates American Sign Language (ASL) as a form of dance, and it makes us aware that movement is a form of language, a language that is nonverbal and gestured. ASL most likely originated in the 1800s, from the intermixing of French Sign Language and local village signing in Connecticut’s American School for the Deaf. Some signs resemble the objects or actions they refer to, and others have evolved to gestures that seem to have no relation to their topics. Like dance, signed language is performed within the medium of space, and like dance, ASL’s gestures and postures are linked in time to create meaning.
Members of the Deaf community tend to view deafness as a difference in human experience, rather than a disability. Antoine Hunter studies deaf culture and has developed this new vocabulary in what he calls “Deaf Culture of Dance.” He has also referred to his style as “raw energy, rooted in freedom, uncontrollable passionate bombastic dance.”
