Join Your TownHomepage 
By David Gordon/Staff Photographer
Yacine Ndiaye, 16, from Dorchester, rehearses a Midsummer Night’s Dream, by an all-deaf cast, which will perform the play during Celebrate Shakespeare Day.
Signing Shakespeare
By Kelly Carroll/Correspondent
Thu Jul 19, 2007, 02:51 PM EDT
Students from the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing are once again participating in the city’s annual Shakespeare event as part of “Celebrate Shakespeare Day” on July 28.
Citi Performing Arts Center is hosting that day in correlation with the July 24-29 professional performances of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” during “Free Shakespeare on the Common.” “Celebrate Shakespeare Day” is the conclusion to the center’s four-week Shakespeare education program. The Horace Mann students, who have been studying “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will become actors as they perform for a crowd of thousands on the Boston Common.
“It will be interesting to see what they do with ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’,” said Eryn Johnson, Citi Performing Arts Center’s director of education. “Like any cultural group, their perspective is different in some ways and the same in some ways.”
The program’s concept, to teach Shakespeare through text, acting and activities, was used at six different sites around Boston, Horace Mann being the only one to implement American Sign Language in its teaching. At least once a week, staff from Citi Performing Arts Center met with students at Horace Mann to discuss Shakespearian themes and how those themes connect to real life. The students then took what they had learned, and created their own interpretation. While working with “The Taming of the Shrew” for last year’s festival, students from Horace Mann dealt with issues such as relationships and abuse.
“We had a wonderful experience [with] ‘Taming of the Shrew’,” said Johnson. “They took the subject matter very seriously and grappled with it in a very interesting way.”
What Johnson found most interesting, however, was what she called “triple translation,” the idea that these students were translating Shakespeare’s writing not only into modern-day language, but also their own, ASL. Triple translation could lead to an entirely different interpretation of the text all together.
The Horace Mann students will be performing on the festival’s “Swan” stage at 1:30 p.m. And while ASL interpreters will be present at all performances, speaking interpreters will be used when the Horace Mann students perform. Despite the language barrier, Johnson recalled the student stages as the busiest last year.
