Deaf Karaoke with David Armand
Direct link to YouTube video here. This is a live performance of the song "Torn" by comedian David Armand of The Hollow Men with singer Natalie Imbruglia at the 2006 Secret Policemen's Ball for Amnesty International.
Visual description: Armand is on-stage at a live event acting out the lyrics to the pop song "Torn" (lyrics here). The performance looks like sign language but has been described as "mime style interpretive dance". I don't know sign, so I don't know if any of the performance uses actual sign language, but much of it is puns and it's cleverly easy to follow for a hearing person: Armand holds up four fingers for the word "for", mimes reeling in a fish for the word "real", and mimes a magic act for the word "illusion". Halfway through this performance, Imbruglia appears on-stage singing and eventually joins him in the gestures. There's a wordless slide guitar part toward the end of the song where Armand and Imbruglia mime playing the guitar.
Is this cultural appropriation? A comedy act that has nothing to do with deafness and Deaf culture? Or is it cultural cross-over that might be useful to the Deaf, Deaf theater, and communication with Deaf folks?
Here's a different mime performance by Armand, to Paul Young's 1980s hit "Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's My Home"
h/t to Group News Blog
5 comments:
If he was pretending to sing in Chinese with "ching-chong" nonsense syllables, would anyone wonder if that was "useful cultural cross-over"? This seems like the same thing to me, just more visual. So many people assume sign languages are just literal mime--without grammar, etymology, regional vocabularies, etc. Calling this "deaf karaoke" just adds to that misperception.
Yeah, I almost changed the title of the post, but decided "deaf karaoke" might add to the conversation because it's been widely used elsewhere to describe the performance. I also looked for discussion of this performance on Deaf blogs and couldn't locate any.
I'm not deaf, but I did take 4 years of ASL in high school, so I have some idea of what real signing is all about. That is not it. I think its pretty terrible.
That wasn't my reaction to it at all. It reminded me more of a "French" Christmas carol my teacher brought out many years ago, where the lyrics to Deck the Halls had been moved over to their closest French auditory equivalents with no regard for actual meaning in French. It was funny as heck, but not intended to be making fun of French-speaking people. I know very little sign, but was perfectly able to tell that this wasn't anything to do with sign-language per se within two gestures.
That said, I'm not deaf (nor obviously a speaker of sign-language), so my opinion is not exactly the one that should be carrying weight.
(For the curious the first couple lines of the carol: Desque des halles sauf pour des olives/falalalala, lalalala/ Theses du saison tant pis jolie/etc. - rough translation: All of the halls except for the olives/fa etc./Thesis of the season, too bad, pretty)
Oh, I don't think Armand is mocking sign language or anything like that. But the fact that the performance has been distributed through YouTube as "Karaoke for the Deaf" makes it of interest when talking about disability, public perception and media coverage.
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