SignWriting History: Questions

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
May 12, 2004

> 1970-1972
> So you have been invited to live in Denmark. That does mean that they 
> (who
> ?? ) have got in contact with your private notation system??  You 
> moved to
> Copenhagen- wow – what about you Danish language skills –Have you felt 
> the
> desire to learn as much as possible – kind of autodidactic course – or 
> ----
> with the help of daily contact with kind Danish hosts?? You did marry a
> Danish man – is that correct? Has he been involved in ballet dancing or
> signlanguage research --
> (Please do not mind me to ask. If it is too personal forgive me and 
> ignore
> the last question. Just because somewhere I read something about this 
> – but
> do not know ….)
>
> What happened in between 1972 and 1974? Did you stay at Copenhagen all 
> the
> time? What kind of job did you do for your living??


Thank you for these questions!

In 1970-1972 I went to Denmark as a ballet student. I chose to travel 
there alone, to study at a famous summer ballet training seminar, in 
Copenhagen. I trained with teachers of the Royal Danish Ballet. I fell 
in love with the Bournonville Schools...that is a special ballet 
training system that was developed by a famous ballet master, August 
Bournonville, in 1832. Teachers had been teaching these historic dance 
steps...by demonstrating it...without any writing system. There were no 
videos of the training at that time either, so it had never been 
recorded visually. And the people were changing the movements 
unintentionally...that was bound to happen if it was not written down 
for historic purposes.

Sooo...after the summer seminar was over, I stayed in Copenhagen and 
asked one of the best teachers, if I could work with her daily, to 
record the beautiful dances on paper. Her name was Edel Pedersen. And 
Edel could not speak English. So through my work with Edel, I learned 
Danish and became conversationally fluent. I never learned Danish in 
any classroom...only through experience. Edel didn't have to teach me 
much...I picked it up real fast...

But regarding the Bournonville preservation work, I worked with Edel 
Pedersen for two years...from 1970 to 1972...daily coming to her living 
room and I would write what she taught me. At first I didn't trust my 
own personal stick figure notation, and started writing it with words - 
sometimes it would take paragraphs to write one dance...many pages...it 
was rediculous to use words...so over the two year period I preserved 
the Bournonville dances, and I started to use my stick figure notation. 
By the time I went to Portugal to dance in 1972, the writing system was 
really getting polished because of those two years writing Bournonville 
in Copenhagen.

What happened after Portugal in 1972? I returned home to California and 
started immediately to write my first textbook, which is now 
out-of-print, but was the official beginning of the writing system. By 
Fall, 1973, the book was done. It was a hard and strenuous job. Books 
in those days were not prepared by computer...I wrote all the diagrams 
by hand myself, and then typed the English for the book on an old style 
typewriter. We then took the book to a typesetter...and the typesetter 
had to type the whole document again into this machine and it gave us 
miles of galleys...long long pages of typesetting, which we had to 
proof for mistakes. I will never forget my mother and I sitting on our 
floor, trying to read all those gallys to find mistakes...we were told 
to read it backwards to catch spelling mistakes, because if you read 
forward, you forget to look for spelling errors! Then we took the 
gallys and the diagrams to a layout artist, and they pasted the book 
onto cardboard with wax. And then we printed 500 copies ourselves. The 
book was called "Sutton Movement Shorthand, The Classical Ballet Key, 
Book 1"...you can see I had dreams of more books - ha!

Then in late Fall, 1973, I became very ill and I was hospitalized in 
San Francisco.... I survived, and in 1974 we started our non-profit 
organization, which was first called The Movement Shorthand Society, 
and later the name was changed to the Center For Sutton Movement 
Writing Inc.

In early 1974, we published our first notated Sheet Dances....a whole 
bunch of them....beautifully published on shiny white paper...just like 
buying the Sheet Music for a song, but instead people could read the 
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, or the Bournonville schools, in Sheet 
Dance form.

So how did I return to Denmark? I wrote a letter to the Queen of 
Denmark, thanking her for all that Denmark had done for me, and for our 
writing system. I sent her a copy of my new book on DanceWriting. I 
explained to the Queen that it was because of Denmark and the 
Bournonville Schools, that I invented the system, and that I hoped that 
by preserving the Bournonville historic dances, that we had somehow 
given something back to Denmark in return. I did this because my 
teacher in Denmark, Edel Pedersen, taught ballet lessons to the Queen 
and her family...so since my books were a direct link to the Queen's 
ballet teacher... Edel was thrilled with this. About one month later, I 
received an invitation from the Royal Danish Ballet to come to teach 
DanceWriting to the Royal Danish Ballet dancers, and that was how I got 
invited back to Denmark. The Queen had given the Royal Danish Ballet 
director, the copy of the book I had sent her...So I returned to 
Denmark in the summer of 1974. I first taught DanceWriting to the 
Tivoli Pantomime Theater dancers in August, and by September I was 
teaching at the Royal Theater. It was an 8 week course.

There were newspaper articles about DanceWriting in the newspapers in 
Copenhagen...Researchers at the University of Copenhagen had a research 
project involving hearing person's gestures. They were doing research 
comparing hearing person's gestures with Deaf people's gestures...and 
they needed a way to write those movements. So after reading the 
newspaper article about DanceWriting, they telephoned me at the Royal 
Theater and asked if I would come to present to their research group in 
the Audiological Department at the University of Copenhagen. The 
researcher who ran the lab was named Lars von der Lieth...a lovely man. 
I bet some people on this List know Lars? Lars and his team were not 
interested in writing signs...They just needed a way to write gesture, 
for a paper they were publishing, so they gave me an office at the 
University with a videotape machine. I watched hours of hearing people 
communicating with their naturally made gestures, and then hours of 
seeing Deaf people signing. That was the first time I took the symbols 
from DanceWriting and applied them to writing the movements I saw on 
the videotape. While doing this work, it struck me that Danish Sign 
Language was exceptionally beautiful. I had never seen a sign language 
before and I fell in love with the visual movements. And I could see it 
was a real language. It was obvious to me, that true communication was 
most definitely there...When I heard later that hearing people hadn't 
realized signed languages were real languages before, I was stunned and 
surprised...How could they think otherwise? So Lars and his team had to 
teach me about the world of the Deaf, and all the sadness that comes 
with it...They told me about Dr. Stokoe's research, and I remember 
saying to Lars that I couldn't believe that people would not have 
assumed what Dr. Stokoe proved, was correct to begin with! But 
nevermind...of course it was great to hear that Dr. Stokoe was able to 
set them all straight!!

That is why, when people say that SignWriting was based on Stokoe's 
research, they are clearly mistaken. I had never heard of Dr Stokoe 
before, when I first wrote Danish signs, and I had no idea of all the 
controversy surrounding sign language issues...

After writing signs from videotape for about three months, I mentioned 
to Lars that Danish Sign Language might benefit from a writing 
system...not one for researchers, but one for Deaf people in their 
daily lives...it is a really beautiful language and I can't imagine 
living without a writing system for my own language. Lars was against 
that idea, and told me that he didn't think anyone would want 
that...They just wanted it for research use....So I kept quiet about my 
idea, and went back to the US...I never gave up that thought 
though...Years later, in 1982, when I returned to teach SignWriting to 
a group of teachers of the Deaf in Copenhagen, Lars invited me back to 
give a little talk to his old research group. It was wonderful to 
return to the old office and area where I had first attempted to write 
signs...and Lars was sooo sweet, and told the audience that he had 
thought I was basically crazy, back in 1974, when I suggested that we 
could write Danish Sign Language, but now he can see that I was right 
and he was glad that I didn't give up! A true gentleman!

You asked above about my Danish husband?....Actually, I didn't marry 
until 1984...a whole ten years later. And my husband was in the US 
visiting his sister, who is married to an American. So he was here and 
we met at a Danish-American party...in Laguna Beach, California, of all 
places! But we did end up having our wedding ceremony in Denmark, but 
then moved to La Jolla after we married, and I have lived here ever 
since. Our marriage ended only a year and 8 months later...that is 
ok...it was the best for both of us, and Kim returned to Denmark...My 
ex-husband was neither a dancer or a sign language person...he taught 
German in the Danish School system - ha!

OK...I will now find some of those first SignWriting documents..some of 
them are really amazing and not what you expect...all from 1974-1975...

Val ;-)