A closer look Delia Ackerman, associate professor of American Sign Language, offered two examples from Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” to show how performance signers approach their work. Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies “This is not about a person literally running in darkness. This is about one person secretly cheating on the other, something that was well known between two of the singers, Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham.” I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain. “Obviously it is not literally breaking a chain. It is about betrayal and the disconnection in the relationship. ‘Chain’ is the thread that keeps them together.” Each line takes time to analyze, and the signer also does background research to match the signs to the intended meaning. Left: Ollie Richmond ’22 performing “Songbird” Right: Alicia Nolan ’22 performing “The Chain” theLAKER | 7 “After you have an understanding of what the lyrics mean, you have to translate them into ASL grammar structure and make sure the subtleties of the lyrics are still intact. It is a long process, but it is so rewarding,” Jojo explained. Jojo performed the band’s song “Dreams,” while Alicia Nolan ’22 performed “The Chain” and Ollie Richmond ’22 performed “Songbird.” Ollie and Alicia also teamed up to perform “Don’t Stop,” the number that closed the show. “This was my first experience with performance signing. I had such a blast with it,” said Alicia. Jojo graduated with a degree in music recording technology but encountered ASL through her fiancé’s mother, who is fluent in the language used by the Deaf and hard of hearing. “I started to learn the basics on my own from Deaf creators on YouTube. I fell in love with the language and the culture and decided to go back to school to study ASL,” she said. ASL was not an FLCC degree program until fall 2019 – both Ollie and Alicia are graduates. Jojo took ASL courses at FLCC in the spring and fall of 2017 then transferred to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is currently a freelance interpreter and musician. Ollie and Alicia are enrolled in NTID’s interpreter training program. “I loved being a part of the Spring Arts Festival,” Jojo said. “The staff who put it on are amazing people, very good at what they do. They were also very flexible with the signers and understood that certain things like lighting and where we stand on stage are imperative to providing the best experience we could for people that use ASL to communicate.” Delia Ackerman, associate professor of American Sign Language, helped her former students prepare for their performance. She noted that a performance signer also has to match the pacing and energy of the band. “Performance signing for music or theater is one of the hardest jobs there is. Jojo, Alicia and Ollie really nailed their performances,” Delia said. “Just looking at pictures of their performances you can see the incredible energy and intensity in their signs, bodies and faces. In Alicia, you can see the translation of anger and betrayal the songwriter feels in ‘The Chain.’ For ‘Dreams,’ you can see the translation of the term wild in Jojo, and for ‘Songbird,’ you can see the peacefulness in Ollie’s face.” – Lenore Friend with photos by Rikki Van Camp
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTcyNDA=