Heidi Rose

A semiotic analysis of artistic American sign language and a performance of poetry

Research has shown that English and American Sign Language (ASL) are distinct languages and communicative forms. Because English is an auditory‐vocal language and ASL is a visual‐gestural language, the translation process from one to the other is complicated. This essay explores the intersemiotic translation and performance of a written poem to artistic ASL, focusing specifically on the visual nature of ASL and the function of its manual and nonmanual components. The value of the analysis is in the recognition of the centrality of the image, or icon, in ASL, and in studying ASLs unique blend of language and gesture for its impact on performance studies.

What is Called Presence

This essay rethinks what is called presence in a way that links important past and present ways of thinking in performance studies. Bringing Wallace Bacons writing into conversation with Walter Benjamin we reflect from a phenomenological position on presence as an experience of “thisness.” Our aim is neither to defend presence as a simple, ontological fact nor to dismiss it altogether as an anachronism of a premedia age. Rather, we seek to affirm what is called presence as an historically situated mode of experience with a view toward clarifying and revaluing the stakes performance studies has therein.

Writing and Performing Mirror Image

I can see her face and body in photographs. I can hear her laughter in my mind’s ear. I can read the words she wrote in poems, letters, and journals. But Amy is gone from the world that we live in and know. Since her death, Amy has existed in the liminal spaces of my life. In memory, in dreams, and in the eyes of friends and family as they look at me and see not-her, her only presence lies in the force of her absence. Mirror Image is my attempt to bring Amy out of those liminal spaces, if only in the moment of performance. Like Marianne Moore’s memorable ‘‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’’ (36), Amy is real when I make her so on stage. Mirror Image is a phenomenological exploration of near-sister cousins and our twin mothers. In writing and performing Mirror Image, I discovered that telling stories about Amy, for me, is not enough to bring her close, to feel her live. Likewise, it is not enough to read her poems, to write or talk about her, even to write in her voice, because I can neither see nor feel a very real part of myself without her physical presence; writing, talking about , or reading contains too much distance. Performing Mirror Image , however, allows me to reduce the distance*/to make her voice and body real through my voice and body. Dividing myself to bring Amy to life becomes an act of self-completion as we come together discursively in performance. Autobiographical performance and autoethnography have become established genres created and discussed at length by a number of performance studies scholars. Several recent texts presented and/or analyzed in Text and Performance Quarterly theoretically and/or thematically question loss, absence, and/or marginality (e.g., Alexander; Gingrich-Philbrook; Park-Fuller; Pineau; Spry). My work has certainly been informed by these texts, so much so that I initially resisted putting Mirror Image into the solo form, concerned that the text/performance would not add anything new or different to the genre in either form or content. After a few different iterations, however (short story, play with three actors), I could not ignore what happened when all characters emerged out of one body, my own.

The DIY Freedom of Performance Studies

This personal narrative traces my journey to performance studies.

Performance and/as Transcendence

This issue of Text and Performance Quarterly highlights performance-centered attempts to challenge the limits of language and constraints of communication in both historical and contemporary moments; on stage, screen, or page; as well as in multiple cultural contexts. Each essay in one way or another probes the capacity of performance to achieve transcendence. Valerie Palmer-Mehta and Alina Haliliuc target silence as a distinct performance strategy that invites audiences into experiencing feminist resistance to oppression in former communist Romania. In their textual analysis of the film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, silence is not conceptualized as nonverbal communication or as the absence of speech but rather as a powerful embodiment of opposition. Within the reality of the film and in the viewing experience of the film, silence provides space for transcendence: the central female characters transcend, if only temporarily, their oppressive existence, and audiences transcend their own lived experience in bearing witness to the other by achieving an empathy made stronger via silence. In the next essay, Gregory Cavenaugh argues that the late-nineteenth century elocution teacher Francois Delsarte sought performance as a means to achieve transcendence*a far more Dionysian-inspired method than other critics have identified as Delsarte’s legacy. As Cavenaugh re-reads Delsarte’s philosophy and method as a desire to fuse body, mind, and spirit in and through performance, he uncovers a fresh link in this chain of our disciplinary past and infuses Delsarte’s work with a revitalized contemporary resonance. In another historical treatment, Justin Trudeau’s textual analysis comparing the original scroll and edited version of On the Road suggests that Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous prose reveals an awareness of his body*his white, heterosexual, male, privileged body*and his desire to acknowledge and exceed that body through a kind of writing that transcended the confines of literary and physical form* a performative writing that engaged his white male body directly and that allowed his readers to live in and with his experience. Trudeau persuades that in this