For Theatre, the Drama is the Libretto

Abstract

The International Visual Theatre, a theater of the deaf, is playing in Paris at the present. They present a howling Gale by violently shaking a cloth: a storm tossed sea is silent. Stillness is figured by a pearl sinking in the waves. The deaf audience follows it with their eyes. For them, silence is the drapery that finally covers them as well. They only lip-read a small portion of what the deaf actors say to one another. Their idiom is American Sign Language, the modern means of communication for the deaf. What would be left of our communication if the spoken text were screened out? Alfredo Corrado, the director of the International Visual Theatre makes the outcome clear: When we observe the conversation of people who can hear, it looks very strange to us: we have the impression that two people are communicating from the neck upwards.' Indeed, for educated people, concentration on the speech act in communicating with one another is often assumed to be selfevident. The cultural precept of verbalizing is so strong and so reinforced through habit, that the distinction between speech act and pragmatic context, as it is made by modern linguistics, retains only