International News

The Power of Expression

Emmanuaelle Laborit is a strikingly expressive actress. While her lively face is conveying her feelings, her fast-moving hands and arms elucidate her thoughts. Her hearing impairment since birth has never deterred her. Talented and determined, she has built her gift for communication. Now, at 35, she is embarking on her greatest theatrical adventure so far.

The International Visual Theatre founded 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, King 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 house 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 won a Moliere, the equivalent of Tony Award, for her performance in Les Enfants du Silence, a French version of Mark Medoff’s award-winning “Children of a Lesser God”. It led to role 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 m in official grants to restore the crumbling century-old theatre, in a cul-de-sac called Cite 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 Theatre. Almost 30 years ago it changed her life.

Since the late 19th century French education policy had banned sing 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 1970’s when Laborit’s parents realized that their daughter was deaf. Doctors told the, that she should learn to speak, but her parents were not persuaded. When Emmanuelle was 7, they heard about the International Visual Theatre, founded two years earlier by a deaf American theater director, Alfredo Corrado, and a French colleague, Jean Gremion.

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.

Source: French theatre celebrated language of the deaf. The Hindustan Times, Daily, New Delhi, 9 February 2007.