| October, 2001 |
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Hearing the Funk: Deaf Dance Troupe Performance at the Inner Harbor.
Imagine feeling music instead of hearing it. Imagine knowing each beat, each quarter note, each word without ever hearing a sound. Could you dance in time, in rhythm to a song if you've never heard it? The thought seems nearly impossible for those who have their hearing, but for The Wild Zappers, a Deaf Dance Troupe, music is something that exists within the body, not outside of it.
In order to increase deaf awareness, Maryland Relay hosted a Deaf Dance Troupe and Storyteller event on September 10, at the HarborPlace Amphitheater. The Wild Zappers, originally founded by Irvine Stewart, is an all male deaf dance troupe that's part of the National Deaf Dance Theater founded in 1988. Fred Beam, the Wild Zappers' Director, Warren Snipe, the Assistant Director of the Wild Zappers and lead of the dance trio, along with Ronnie Bradley, a Zappers' member, performed pop, hip hop, and funk routines in order to promote cultural and educational awareness of the deaf community.
Dressed in all black with silver shirts, the trio not only kept meticulous beat and rhythm with the music but they also lip-synched the words in exact time. According to the group's website, www.invisiblehands.com, the group "was created to give deaf male dancers an opportunity to dance together and promote cultural/educational awareness through entertainment within deaf and hearing communities. It was also created to educate deaf and hearing through workshops related to dance and theater."
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Warren Snipe, Fred Beam, and Ronnie Bradley perform a dance move in front of the Baltimore Inner Harbor
MD Relay also had Lori Mainard on hand, a deaf storyteller who wove stories centered around deaf-acceptance, self-acceptance, and cultural understanding. With a variety of stories, from folklore to fable, Mainard intrigued the audience with tales of deaf soldiers during the Civil War and a story of a hawk that was forced to live as a chicken. However, the most intriguing aspect of her stories was that they all held a moral, of acceptance, of determination, and of hopefulness, both for the deaf and the hearing alike. Mainard's stories also featured an oral interpretation.
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Lori Mainard, using sign language to tell a fable to the audience.
With more than 500,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens in the state of Maryland, the event proved to be a great source of integrating deaf awareness with cultural enrichment.
* For more information on MD Relay, visit www.mdrelay.org
