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How do the deaf and hearing-impaired experience music?
DW (English)
Follow
4/17/2025
How do the deaf experience music or even make music? A project in Lithuania brings hearing and the deaf together on stage.
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News
Transcript
Display full video transcript
00:01
Dance, poetry, music.
00:03
You don't have to be able to hear to express yourself artistically.
00:07
How do deaf people feel and perform music?
00:10
And what can someone with typical hearing learn from the deaf community?
00:15
The musical project called Not What We Agreed, based in Lithuania,
00:20
brought the hearing impaired and hearing communities together to create art.
00:24
Marker Vorohemo, better known as Signmark, is a deaf rap artist from Finland.
00:29
He works with the Lithuanian deaf community and consults the performers.
00:33
Marker's international career wouldn't have been successful if he had followed the critics' advice.
00:40
Around me there were people who would say,
00:43
Oh, the way you sign looks so cool, since they had never seen that.
00:48
And I thought, there has to be something special here.
00:53
But they've said to me it's better to pick another dream.
00:59
Nina is another member of the ensemble.
01:01
She's also deaf and has always dreamed of writing poetry.
01:05
Now she performs her own poem on stage, highlighting everyday struggles.
01:10
When I approach hearing people and tell them I'm deaf, they get extremely lost.
01:19
It seems to put a mountain between us.
01:22
But it is possible to gesticulate somehow, to figure out what to do next, and it can be done together.
01:29
But when the hearing person is lost, I can't do anything to get close, there's a wall between us.
01:34
Music is an integral part of Nina's life too.
01:42
It brings me peace and relaxes my thoughts.
01:45
Amid the daily stress of work, I have music.
01:49
I can choose from a range of moods.
01:51
Sad, happy and everything in between.
01:54
Vilius is another performer.
01:57
He was born deaf, but from an early age, he was fascinated by music.
02:02
So he begged his mother to buy him an accordion and started learning to play.
02:08
The teacher said it'd be impossible to teach a deaf person.
02:12
Tears began rolling down my face.
02:14
The teacher shook his head and had a long talk with my mother.
02:17
Finally he asked me to try to get the rhythm.
02:19
One, two, three, one.
02:21
Unfortunately, sometimes Vilius wasn't allowed to play or speak in sign language.
02:28
These sad experiences are documented in his performance.
02:37
Lithuanian actor and singer Dominikus Vajcikunis is the driving force behind the Not What We Agreed project,
02:44
which brings together the beauty of sign language, poetry and music.
02:47
We tried to just translate spoken language, but it didn't work correctly.
02:57
So we started to create everything in sign language.
03:00
And then I started to translate in Lithuanian language.
03:04
And then we started to combine those methods.
03:08
So this performance is about finding the ways how we can create together without dominating each other's language.
03:22
There were those who wanted Dominikus to design this project solely for the deaf community and exclude hearing people.
03:29
I said no. And I think that's the problem, how we think.
03:35
We think that we need to specify the audiences and to do specials for them.
03:41
And this is aggression. This is power position, how we look at people.
03:44
Rapper Signmark works together with Dominikus in rehearsals.
03:50
He travels around the world to connect with deaf communities.
03:53
If I'm performing for deaf people, I can offer them the culture and deeper meanings within the culture
04:02
and language that hearing people might not experience or understand the same way.
04:07
I try to communicate it through facial expressions, my body, gestures and hands.
04:12
But hearing people don't understand that. All they see is, oh, cool signs.
04:23
Not what we agreed is not a conventional performance.
04:27
The audience might be asked to take off their shoes and even hold a balloon between their palms to feel the vibrations.
04:34
So how does the audience like it?
04:35
It was really interesting to me to see that they could actually feel music in a different way.
04:43
And I found that really interesting that actually music brings us all together.
04:47
It's a very meaningful project for both communities.
04:51
Hearing people can understand what deafness is and how these people feel.
04:55
These performers from Lithuania show us how music can be experienced in unexpected ways.
05:00
They also prove that obstacles mainly exist in our heads.
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