A balm for our ears and heart: Art helping heal trauma in the deaf community

Taking a look in from the outside can offer the advantage of a clearer, possibly more objective perspective. I put that to Gal Naor, who is here from his adopted home patch of Berlin to join forces with performers from the Na Laga’at cultural center in Jaffa, which works with deaf, blind, and deaf-blind people.

Naor shares artistic directorial duties with fellow Germany-based Israeli performance artist and choreographer Matan Zamir of The Progressive Wave collaborative multidisciplinary project they founded in Berlin 10 years ago.

Zamir and Naor are currently putting three deaf performers through their paces in preparation for a production of SOS 24, the final installation of their Science of Signs trilogy, which examines the interfaces between spiritual ideas and practice, and performance art.

The show forms part of this year’s Na Laga’at Festival for Groundbreaking Arts (December 3-7), which was launched seven years ago as a platform for artists with sensory disabilities. The festival calls on artists from the fields of theater, dance, and music to proffer original creations that reference sensory constraints and traverse physical boundaries.

Naor says he and Zamir have, indeed, adopted a particular viewpoint on the tragic and traumatic events that have evolved here over the past close to 14 months, although not so much as Israelis following the news with the “luxury” of geographic distance.

“Matan and I feel that, after October 7, as Israelis or as Jews, we were forced to take stock of our identity. Before that, we thought we were part of the big wide world, and that our national or religious identity was unimportant. The world had a different take on that,” he wryly laughs. “We were forced into a corner, but we grabbed onto the challenge with both hands.”

During the course of our conversation, I learned that Naor is made of sterner stuff and possesses all sorts of talents and skills that enable him to address matters of great emotional and political import and depth. Some of that comes from home.

His paternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor who was incarcerated in Auschwitz, and his father died relatively young, having lived with the weighty psychological baggage he inherited. The other side of the family prompted Naor to acquire an important tool that he is putting to good use in Jaffa. “My mother is the oldest child of deaf parents. I learned Israeli sign language at home,” he explains.

That was spawned by natural curiosity and a desire to communicate with his grandparents. He took that expertise a couple steps further and qualified as a sign language interpreter at Bar-Ilan University.

NAOR’S BIO also includes acting studies at the Thelma Yellin School of Arts in Givatayim. A year later, in 2011, he relocated to Berlin and continued to hone his skills in the performing arts, while enhancing his sign language faculties.

“It is a language that can accommodate anything. It has endless layers to it. People say you can’t express everything in sign language, but I say durch, as they say in German.” The word, in context, translates along the lines of “full steam ahead.”

SOS 24 is very much language-based, with liberal seasoning from an intriguing spread of ancient civilizations and cultures, and their literary and sonic heritages.

With the support of the Goethe-Institut, Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv, the Yasmeen Godder Studio in Jaffa, as well as the host organization at the Jaffa Port, Naor and Zamir have culled an expansive arc of disciplines, and cultural, historical, religious, and ethnographic references.

Next year marks the 80th anniversary of the fall of the Nazi regime. That also comes into the Progressive Wave purview, as the Israeli Berliners look to forge a peace-inducing cultural alliance between Israel and Germany in an inclusive collaboration that points us all toward peacemongering domains.

The project comprises three main areas: group-person relations and expressive dance, sign language poetics, and ancient Indigenous prayers (chants and melodies) from the Amazonian rainforests.

Naor and Zamir are developing a unique avenue of creation that marries practical aspects of native sign languages, aka “Holistic Sign Language,” untouched by audism – biblical Hebrew poetry from Psalms and Song of Songs, and the oral traditions, including recitations and music of the Indigenous Yawanawá people from the rainforests of Brazil. That sounds like a potent intercultural cocktail.

This has been brewing for a while. “We started with the trilogy in 2016,” says Naor. “It engages in various spiritual schools of thought whereby, each time, we focus on a different one. We began with translating fundamental teachings of Kabbalah, continued onto Indian scriptures – in a show called Oraculo – and we always knew that, when the third part of the trilogy came into being, it would deal with the wisdom and culture of the Indians in the rainforests.”

The thinking behind that was to eventually impart that philosophical core to people from other areas of the world, mostly with very different ideas about life on Earth.

“We wanted to see how we could bring the basic principles of togetherness, and their culture, into the Western world,” Naor explains. “It might be a bit pretentious, but there is the thought that it is possible to solve the problems of the Western world with the wisdom and cultures of the natives in the rainforests.”

That might well be worth a try. After all, we don’t seem to be doing too well with what we’ve been doing so far over the millennia of inflicting violence on one another.

SOS 24 embraces that approach and runs with it, as hearing and non-hearing performers work their collaborative magic through a multifaceted prism of acting, dance, music, and language, particularly the richness of biblical Hebrew.

Naor alludes to the possibility that civilizations of yore were able to communicate across the seas, without the benefit of satellite and Internet channels of communication.

“I have been studying Kabbalah for over half my life. There is the secret of the love between the [Hebrew] letters from before the creation of the world,” he posits. “The [Amazonian Basin] tribal Pano language is very similar to biblical Hebrew, our language.”

He backs that surprising notion up to the hilt. “There is, for example, a tribal prayer called ‘Dori Nakeh,’ which is very similar to Hebrew. The sonic affinity gave birth to connections with biblical song, particularly Psalms and Song of Songs. We were very moved by that, and the music [for the show] just flowed out of it.”

Naor says he finds working with deaf performers makes him sensorially keener. “People might wonder how we can cooperate with actors who can’t hear the soundtrack of the production. But, you know, they sense things, like they say the blind can have eyes in the back of the head. It is fascinating and moving.”

SOS 24 is clearly not purely entertainment oriented. “This is not just about making something nice for people to see,” Naor notes. “We want to see how we can use these artistic and creative tools to generate a domain for healing, for accommodating pain, for healing trauma.”

Na Laga’at CEO Oren Itzhaki goes along with that, big time. He adds some street-level observations, too. “We want to bridge gaps, break down stigmas in society.” That, he feels, also helps facilitate our way through PC-sensitive minefields. “We don’t want people to feel uncomfortable about others who are different from them. That is the essence of Na Laga’at.”

Itzhaki says he has traversed a learning curve himself in his 8 years at the helm. “We all have some lack of awareness. When I started working at Na Laga’at, I thought blind people need to be helped across the street. I discovered I was wrong.”

The center is one of the leading organizations of its kind in the world in empowering the deaf and blind, and Itzhaki says there are plans to spread the word, physically, around the globe. “Further down the line, I don’t know how many years from now, there will be Na Laga’at in Paris, in Amsterdam, all over.”

The five-dayer, which features culinary events, an open stage for artists with and without disabilities, comedy, discussions, and sign language theater, is designed to help bring some of those messages to the general public.

“Actors with disabilities can earn a living from their profession, and in other fields,” says Itzhaki. “But the conditions around us have to change, particularly in relation to accessibility and inclusion. We recently opened the world’s first performing arts school for deaf and blind performers. I hope that helps too.”

For tickets and more information: (03) 633-0808 and nalagaat.org.il.