Paris: Emmanuelle Laborit builds bridges between the deaf and hearing

[Harold F. Schiffman]

In Paris, Emmanuelle Laborit builds bridges between the deaf and hearing
By Alan Riding

Tuesday, February 13, 2007  PARIS

Emmanuelle Laborit is a strikingly expressive actress. While her lively
face is conveying her feelings, her fast-moving hands and arms elucidate
her thoughts. Being deaf since birth has never deterred her. Talented and
determined, she has built her stage and screen career around her gift for
communication. Now, at 35, she is embarking on her greatest theatrical
adventure so far. The International Visual Thtre, founded here in 1976 to
promote the use of sign language and to present deaf actors onstage, has
for the first time found a permanent home in a renovated 185-seat theater
near Pigalle. And Laborit is its director and its main star. Her aim is
simple: To build a bridge between deaf and hearing people by demonstrating
that they can communicate perfectly with one another onstage as well as
with an audience also made up of the deaf and hearing.

The company's opening production, "K. Lear," an adaptation of
Shakespeare's tragedy, with Laborit in the role of Cordelia, goes a long
way toward proving her case. Imaginative, moving and eminently theatrical,
the production drew full houses for three weeks in Paris before recently
going on tour. No doubt part of the attraction was Laborit herself, who
has been something of a household name here since 1993. That year she won
a Molire, the French theater's top award, for her performance in "Les
Enfants du Silence," a French version of Mark Medoff's award-winning play
"Children of a Lesser God." It led to roles in numerous other plays and a
dozen movies. The attention, which gave her access to government circles,
was a factor in helping her raise $3.4 million in official grants to
restore the crumbling century-old theater in a cul-de-sac called Cit
Chaptal, which the company took over in 2003. By assuming the project,
however, Laborit was also repaying a debt of gratitude to the
International Visual Thtre.  Almost 30 years ago it changed her life.

Since the late 19th century, French education policy had banned sign
language and required deaf children to be taught to lip read and, where
possible, to use hearing aids and learn to speak. One early argument was
that God could not be expressed in sign language. Later it was claimed
that sign language further isolated the deaf. "It is a fantasy of hearing
people who want the deaf to hear," Laborit said through an interpreter,
"as if deafness were a handicap that should be cured." This was still
official policy in the early 1970s when Laborit's parents realized that
their daughter was deaf. Doctors told them that she should learn to speak,
but her parents were not persuaded. When Emmanuelle was 7, they heard
about the International Visual Thtre, founded two years earlier by a deaf
American theater director, Alfredo Corrado, and a French colleague, Jean
Grmion.

With the help of two other Americans, Bill Moody and Ralph Robbins, both
adept at American Sign Language, they began training deaf French actors
and holding workshops for deaf children. It was there that Laborit
discovered sign language. "From that day on I became a chatty and happy
little girl," she recalled. In 1980, when she was 9, she appeared onstage
for the first time in a play created and directed by Robbins. Though she
would not devote herself to acting for another decade, she remained in
contact with the International Visual Thtre, which then occupied space in
the Chteau de Vincennes outside Paris. With limited resources, the company
concentrated on teaching French Sign Language and was able to produce only
about one play a year.

After her success in "Les Enfants du Silence" Laborit rejoined the troupe
to play the lead role in "Antigone," which was presented at the 1995
Avignon Festival and toured Greece and several Asian countries. In 2002,
when local authorities wanted to use their space and the theater had to
leave Vincennes, Laborit was invited to join Jean-Franois La Bouverie as
the company's co-director. The following year she became its sole director
and began planning its rebirth in its own theater in the heart of Paris.
Encouragingly, French policy also changed. In 1991 schools were authorized
to teach sign language; and in 2005 sign language was recognized as an
official language.

While deaf theater has long existed in the United States and in some
European countries, the International Visual Thtre is unusual in that it
also teaches sign language to about 800 students a year. But it is through
its stage productions that the company, which has an annual budget of $2.2
million, now hopes to reach out to both deaf and hearing audiences.
Surprisingly, the deaf public may prove harder to attract. "Hearing people
are more used to going to the theater," Laborit explained.  "For obvious
reasons the deaf don't normally go to the theater. So, yes, it's normal
that more hearing people attended 'K. Lear.' It will take time for the
deaf to learn about this theater and to get used to coming here."

"K. Lear," adapted and directed by Marie Montegani, involved both deaf and
hearing actors, some of whom also learned sign language for the occasion.
Yet while the "speaking" gestures of the deaf actors had to be
interpreted, either by other actors or occasionally on a screen behind the
stage, the pace of the play never faltered, with the sign language
doubling as a passionate form of choreography. In the French troupe's
version of "King Lear" the premise is that Lear, played by Clementine
Yelnik, and Laborit's Cordelia are living a flashback of the tragedy that
ends in their deaths. At the same time the play's subplot involving
Gloucester and his sons, Edmund and Edgar, has been eliminated in order to
focus attention on Lear's troubled relationship with his daughters.

For the company's first season at the Cite Chaptal, Laborit has scheduled
seven more productions, including plays by Beckett and Dario Fo, a new
one-man show by Corrado interpreted by Moody, and a staging of La
Fontaine's fables for a young audience. "I want this theater to have a
long life here," Laborit said. "What's great is that people who are
learning French Sign Language here can see it in action in the theater.
And they can see that it is not owned by the deaf. It can be used by
everyone. I once used sign language as an act of resistance, but it is
really just one more language."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/13/features/riding.php
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