VOIR CE QUI EST DIT, research note, 2016

Sign language¹ has the particularity of being a language that cannot be set by writing. It is directly traced in a space of speech in three dimensions, called “signing space.” This spatial dimension generates a syntactic structure closer to film editing than to the linear constructions of verbal languages. In her description of the orchestra, Noha El Sadawy uses the zoom, the alternation of shots and the dolly shot as forms of enunciations. As if it took place through the focal length of a camera, the viewpoint of what is said is directed and variable. The visual nature of the language and its proximity with the real offers the descriptive genre a particularly fertile invention potential and experimentation field: the description of a concrete form is not reduced to a simple pantomime; the language extracts characteristic features and portrays an image of the real in just a few gestures, detailing its appearance by means of different linguistic tools. Several things can be said simultaneously by combining the configuration, orientation and placement of the hands; the amplitude and rhythm of the movements; the position of the shoulders and head; facial expression; the direction in which the eyes look and the position of the lips and tongue. The face’s mimics – more semantic than affective – form the prosodic contours of Sign (similar to the inflection and rhythm of speech); the signs expressed by the hands would be incomprehensible without these facial precisions. Much more than the modularities of a voice, they reveal the orator’s personality and paradoxically give this silent language a musicality.

Profoundly deaf, Noha El Sadawy perceives nothing of the music and must take other paths to seize what is being played opposite her. Her eyes sweep the enormous group of some 80 musicians in order to capture a few details, which her hands, her body, her face say in time, building the image of the sound. From time to time, her eyes glance over the orchestra, list positions, go from one musician to another, try to perceive, lack precision. She offers a somewhat flat image, stutters, then suddenly captures, incarnates a secondary movement, a general momentum, a particular expression, a modification of the vibrations. Gradually she builds her description, returns to the elements perceived and sketched, details them, combines them, gives them meaning.

According to the physician and philosopher Israel Rosenfield, the brain invents what it perceives: movement creates a world of disorganised and unstable visual, tactile and auditory sensations based on which a coherent sensorial environment must be built. The brain does this by inventing an entire palette of perceptions: a series of mental constructions that we can see, hear and feel when we look at, listen to or touch something. This performance is a poetic test of this hypothesis on the functioning of perception: for the signing deaf person, the orchestra is a confused image, a host of movements and variations in expressions. Faced with this chaotic environment, it was necessary to use language to organise a sparse perception.