A
cclaimed choreographer and dancer Chris Fonseca found fame when his audition for BBC reality show The Greatest Dancer went viral. The YouTube video in which he pops, locks, tuts and emits a beaming positivity has been viewed almost 2.4 million times. Why did it cause such a response with viewers? As a Deaf artist, he put on this extraordinary performance without being able to hear the music, but rather “feeling it” instead.
That was in 2019, and a lot has happened since then. The past three years have been a process of coming to terms with himself. Now Fonseca (who always capitalises the D in Deaf) has collected some of his experiences into Follow the Signs, a hip-hop gig theatre show at Soho Theatre.
“It’s about me growing up, my journey, the obstacles that I’ve had to deal with and the barriers that have made me who I am today,” he says. “I wanted to share the shame I’d felt, share the trauma and also celebrate the struggles. Hopefully through storytelling I’m able to impact other people so they’re able to feel and have empathy and relate to it.”
When I visit, massive speakers stand in the middle of a white-walled room in the central London rehearsal room where Fonseca and his team are putting the show together. The team has spent the morning working out how to translate the words of the show into British Sign Language. Spoken English and BSL don’t always map precisely onto each other. It matters which hand Fonseca uses to sign a particular word so that Deaf audience members can see it clearly. He has signed a word too quickly; could he hold it for just a second longer?
Raphaella Julien and Chris Fonseca in rehearsals for Follow the Signs at Soho Theatre
/ Phoebe Capewell
Read More
Finally director and co-writer Harry Jardine calls lunch, and we sit down at the side of the rehearsal space with two interpreters who take it in turns to translate Fonseca’s signing.
“When Black Lives Matter happened I realised that people see me as a Black man first, before they see me as a Black Deaf man. Being Deaf is an invisible disability,” he says.
“I wanted to take my authentic self, all the stuff that has been building up for years, that frustration and anger, my concerns about code switching and express all that to an audience, regardless of whether they’re Black, white, Deaf. I want them to go: ‘Oh, I get it’. That is where we need to be. I need to be my authentic self.”
The audience sees Fonseca dancing, incorporating BSL, while Jardine raps from the side of the stage, essentially acting as Fonseca’s voice. Meanwhile a …….
Source: https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/dance/deaf-dancer-chris-fonseca-b1018978.html