FRENCH FIRST PERFORMANCE
Visual radio in sign language. It’s a performance installation especially designed for deaf people. It’s a radio to be looked at. This is a silent show. This way hearing people experience a show done only in sign language. The job here is not to be emotionally attached to the music, the job is to transform by self in an extension of the artist’s voice and become music for a while. To be music.
MARÍA SIEBALD
María Siebald is a Chilean actress and musician whose main goal is to make music video clips for the deaf community. She was born in 1980, and since 2009 has been directing performances and visual activities which use sign language in order to bring deaf people to music and other arts related to it, such theatre and more. María’s work has been recognized as outstanding as it is now very popular among the deaf community and people who enjoy visual arts, winning the Avonni prize in Culture in 2015.
Since she was just a child, Maria has been interested in helping deaf people to understand more about their environment. She used to live near a deaf school and that is why she was always curious about how those people could ever enjoy something such music.
So she decided to use her actress abilities and her choreography knowledge to create beautiful pieces of art that can be adored by everybody, especially by those who can’t hear. “I don’t see deaf people as diseased people. I see them as normal persons who have a musical necessity just as you and me” said María.
Deaf persons can also feel music using their other senses. For instance, they can read a song’s lyric or sense vibrations through their touch. But what María wanted was even better and her projects try to combine a series of elements that can give the deaf a unique feeling.
