Surrey Now in Canada wrote an in-depth profile of deaf high school student Mari Klassen, 18, (pictured) whose American Sign Language (ASL) poems have won her accolades there.According to the story, "Mari has excelled at ASL poetry since she was in elementary school when her poem on bullying won a national award from the Canadian Cultural Society for the Deaf. She flew to Toronto to receive the award and had the poem filmed while she was there. When she was 14, Mari was back in front of the cameras, this time as the subject of a documentary where she performed her poem, 'Who am I,' in concert with the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra.
"For Mari, the audience is always a big consideration in the way an ASL poem is created and presented. When performing for a deaf audience, she is free to express herself using the entire gamut of signs, gestures and motions available to people fluent in the language.
"A hearing audience presents different challenges, as she must slow down and simplify her ASL to ensure everyone watching can understand.
"'With a hearing audience, it might go over their heads a little if I do it with lots of ASL and facial expressions,' Mari says. 'I try to use more gestures with a hearing audience. I can do this (mimics taking a drink) and everybody is going to know what that means. I think about the audience. In ASL there are lots of signs and classifiers that, for hearing audiences, are going to be hard to understand. Deaf people are going to understand it but everybody else wouldn't.'"
