ASL Opera

Welcome to the ASL Opera Project where Janna Sweenie and David Boles are working to bring American Sign Language interpreting to Opera performances all over the world.

This ASL Opera Project was divined in order to right a wrong: the assumption that the Deaf are not interested in Opera. This project provides resources in performance and conclusion to help bring the high art of Opera to a diverse, if disabled, audience.

How does Janna, a Deaf woman with some residual hearing, interpret these arias in ASL? First, she has a printout of the lyrics in English. Then, she watches the video performance with English subtitles to learn the metrics of the staging. ASL is not English, so she then has to perform the interpreted translation of the singing into the language of the Deaf.

For her recorded performances here, she listens to, and feels, the audio of the target aria video using her hearing aids and performatively interprets via original aria language, to memorized English-translated text, into her ASL visual performance to present what you see. It's all a language memorization test with her splashes of brilliance to make it all make sense in context.

If this were a live-interpreted ASL Opera performance, Janna would use the live text captioning in the theatre to translate her ASL interpretation in real time for the Deaf audience.

We do not use any music in our interpreted arias because we do not have the Copyright to the source performance. That's why you need to simultaneously click on each video to see both the ASL interpretation and the performance being presented. They will sync up enough for you to get a good idea how the process will work in a live performance.