Sign language opera sings out in Finland

From Reuters on July 13:

On a small island off southwest Finland, a new art form has enraptured audiences, bringing opera to those who might seem farthest beyond its reach: the deaf.

"This is like a new food you order. You don't know what it's going to taste like; you just take it and try it out," said Juho Saarinen, one of a new order of "opera signers," amplifying the mime characteristic of normal opera with sign language adapted to convey the mood and tone of music.

Producer Marita Barber, who gave signed opera its world premiere on the tiny Aland islands of southwestern Finland, had mixed feelings about the concept when it first arose three years ago. She accepted that, as with "hearing" opera, the taste may, for some, take a while to acquire.

"I thought this was going to be a success or a flop . . . then I saw that other people reacted to it and I really wondered why in the world no one had ever done this before," she said after a performance in Helsinki.

Signed theatre is performed frequently at venues around the world, and regular sung opera has been interpreted into sign language on the side of the stage, but this summer the 10-year- old Theatre Totti was the first to make a sign-language opera.

After a performance of 19th-century Finnish composer Fredrik Pacius' The Hunt of King Charles, signer Kolbrun Volkudottir said she felt exhausted, but the effort was worth the pain.

"Usually when you go to the theatre, the show itself is the message. In this case, the most important message was to show that deaf people can do opera . . . that we can do whatever we want," she said.

In sign language opera, all performers sign rather than sing, with body language and facial expressions central to the experience. Two musicians provide the score for the hearing.

Just as in Milan's La Scala and other grand opera houses of the world, there are surtitles for those who cannot understand the signed libretto.

Finding the right performers for the opera, played on small stages and seen by sellout audiences of about 700 so far, was the hardest task.

"We needed a baritone, a soprano -- we needed facial expressions and gestures to get the feeling and the atmosphere across," Barber said.