BeatRoute Magazine BC Edition January 2019

PRINCE
HAMLET
Adding a New Poetry to Shakespearean
Classic with Sign Language
By Leah Siegel
If you were to ask 1000 questions about
anything, what would it be? In her art installation
titled Race Cards, multi-disciplinary artist
Selina Thompson asks 1000 questions about
race and racism. What started as performance
art in which Thompson invited strangers to
watch her as she sat in a room writing question
after question has now become a travelling
exhibit showcasing a subject everyone should
be questioning every chance they get. To dive
deep into herself and pull these questions from
her experience wasn’t easy and was, at times,
detrimental to Thompson’s mental and physical
wellbeing. The installation began as a 12-hour
performance, writing 800 questions as people
entered the room one at a time to watch her
write and watch the installation grow.
“[The experience] made me very ill, so I said I
never wanted to do that again,” says Thompson
of the beginnings of her provocative work. “So
we turned it into an installation. I rewrite it
every nine months or so – update questions
that are out of date, or no longer relevant,
put things in that are now essential. We make
edits for different national contexts and when
working with a different language, I translate in
collaboration with a local artist of colour, so a
lot changes there too. But it is one long stream
of consciousness at its heart. It was very, very
hard, emotionally. Part of why the work needs
a boundary around it is to protect me from the
residue of that experience.”
Thompson’s inspirations for Race Cards
lies within the name of the installation itself,
something that’s been under the noses of
those who can’t relate to the experience of the
transgressions – macro and micro – that people
of colour face on a daily basis.
“I have to be upfront and confess immediately
that I am not a particularly subtle person,”
Thompson adds. “I don’t have that kind of
smarts, so the inspiration is literally the term
‘playing the race card.’ I was sick of being told
I was doing it, sick of hearing it used to silence
people, irritated by the fact that this was a
terminology that had been used to disempower
and negate the experiences of people since I was
small, and seemed to be the case.
Initially, I wanted to turn it on its head, find a
way of playing a race card that was empowering.
I was also super interested in internet –
particularly Twitter – discourse around race. The
speed of it, the mix of autobiography and theory
in a very specific way, the competition, the oneupmanship.
I was also sick of being asked about
race by people who were decades older than me.
That’s enough. I’m going to ask the questions
now.
The person asking the questions is the person
that holds the power, because they’re setting
the discourse – and that’s part of why whiteness
situates race as a problem that people of colour
need to solve, to maintain that power dynamic. I
wanted to try to outsmart it.”
By turning the tables on the conversation and
by having those who hold power over the source
of racism through virtue of whiteness and the
privilege that is inherent within it, Thompson
aims to make people think, but what they take
away from it is entirely up to them.
“How people feel as they read them is not
my business, nor my concern,” she says. “I
know that sounds really harsh and standoffish,
but it’s not a theatre work, where I’m kind of
locking an audience into what is essentially a
trigger chamber to stimulate specific feelings.
An installation is much more open ended. You
can walk away when it’s too much. I have less
pressure to entertain. There is a clearer boundary
and I like that boundary and the work it does,
so it can stay in place. Feel what you want, take
away what you want – the work of coming to
terms with race is lifelong, and no one can do it
for you.”
Race Cards runs from January 23-February 2 at
the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation
Center as part of the PuSh Festival.
A little over 10 years ago, Ravi Jain was trying
to establish a theatre company in Toronto.
He had just returned from a stint abroad
and was still reacquainting himself with
Canadian audiences. For his first production,
he mounted a perennial favorite: William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A decade later, he’s
coming back to the Danish prince – but not
because he’s in need of a crowd-pleaser.
“Part of revisiting an old play like Hamlet
is to show that there is more to be found in
this play than we know,” Jain says. “It’s a great
opportunity to challenge the status quo, and
to show us that another world is possible
when you change who gets to tell the story.”
In Why Not Theatre’s production of Prince
Hamlet, there are a number of changes made,
but perhaps the most significant is who now
relays the story to the audience: Horatio –
Hamlet’s best friend and (spoiler alert!) the
play’s sole survivor – played by deaf actress
Dawn Jani Birley. For this shift in perspective,
Birley and Jain had to translate from scratch
Shakespeare’s poetic English into American
Sign Language (ASL).
“There are three styles of ASL that are
happening throughout the show,” Jain
explains, including a more expressive, imagebased
type of ASL that Birley developed for
the production. “The response to that has
been amazing, because deaf audiences don’t
normally get to experience that same level
of poetry. An interpreter is often giving a
neutral expression of what is happening, so
it’s as if you’re reading the play for yourself.
You just read it. There’s no emotion, there’s
no context. What Dawn does so incredibly
is embody and perform the emotion to
communicate the expression of the text.
There’s a lot of nuance to what she does that
just brings it to life.”
A signing Horatio isn’t just an artistic
choice for Jain: it’s also political. “Dawn speaks
a lot about deaf people being forgotten, being
invisible, and not being given importance in
society. In our version, the deaf person has
the most important role: the storyteller,” he
says. “The story is literally in her hands.”
Prince Hamlet runs from January 23-27 at the
Frederic Wood Theatre as part of the PuSh
Festival.
RACE
CARDS
Flipping the Deck on the
Conversation around Racism
by Joey Lopez
Photo by Manuel Vason
January 2019 13