Using Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Cai Glover and his fellow dancers from Cas Public, a Canada-based dance company, moved through both silence and sound. Their show, 9.2, held last Friday at the ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance, explored the tension between the hearing world’s expectations and the deaf experience.
The performance began with a video of a young child on the MainStage’s screen taking off his hearing aid after struggling to adapt to the distortion in hearing caused by his cochlear implant. Glover, co-artistic director and co-choreographer of the project, simultaneously removed his own hearing aid, an action that set the tone of the rest of the performance.
After contracting bacterial meningitis at age 8, Glover lost his hearing. When he was nine, doctors implanted a cochlear device meant to improve his hearing, but the results were not what he had hoped for. “I couldn’t even differentiate my parents’ voice or my sister’s voice,” Glover said.“It was deeply upsetting, especially to a 9-year-old when people had told you you’re gonna be able to hear.”
Having some memory of sound helped Glover gain professional ballet training, a medium that is often inaccessible to deaf artists. “I came from very ableist methods of training, like a classical ballet background, that was not accessible to [my deaf friends],” he said. According to Glover, instructors rely primarily on the dancer’s ability to hear music and move along with it, which ignores artists with hearing difficulties, as the implants make it difficult for the artists to clearly hear the music.
Glover finds that, as a deaf artist, frustration is inherent to his expression through dance. “There’s this real anger coming from probably never feeling heard and never feeling like I could fit in,” he said.
He finds this anger in Beethoven’s music, too. “[Beethoven] has a rage in his music that I think really speaks to me,” he said. “And when we do end up unpacking my relationship to having lost my hearing, there is a lot of rage.”
Glover’s choice to set his piece to Beethoven’s music was partly inspired by the musician’s own past. Before composing his ninth symphony, Beethoven had already lost most of his hearing. “It was hard to ignore on this subject that [Beethoven] was profoundly deaf by the time he wrote the Ninth Symphony.”
To pay homage to the deaf experience, Cas Public’s 9.2 featured six dancers onstage while the video of the deaf child continued on the screen behind the dancers. The child was depicted operating a small remote-controlled car, equipped with a camera, that moved across the stage during the dancers’ performance. The screen behind the dancers would switch between pre-recorded videos and the live feed from the camera. The piece explored the everyday struggles of deaf people in an ableist world and examined how more spaces are becoming increasingly inaccessible for hard-of-hearing people. Before rejoining Cas Public for 9.2, Glover had spent significant time with other deaf artists to understand how they navigate dancing without the professional training that he was able to receive.
Glover said that the performance rewrote the narrative about deaf people. To him, the act of removing his hearing aid and performing in silence represented taking control of the stage. “If we were following the music, then music takes [priority], and then hearing dancers can follow the music, and I have to follow the hearing dancers,” he said. “Whereas if it’s [silent] it’s easier for me to not follow the music because I can’t hear it, and then [the hearing dancers] have to follow me, and they have to sit with the tension of being like, ‘Oh, but we’re not hitting that rhythm.’”
The choreography was a blend of ballet, modern, and contemporary dance infused with sign language. Glover has long worked to incorporate sign language into his performance. Conversations with audience members have informed Glover’s sign language use in his choreography.
After one of his performances, a deaf audience member came up to him and explained how enlightening it was to see art that included sign language.
Glover hopes the performance showcased the importance of unity in building a communal rhythm, even in the absence of music.
“I really hope that the togetherness stands out, because it takes a lot for us to try to [stay together] — and even in the structure of the work, we build towards coming together,” Glover said. “This work is about perception in many ways — that it’s shared and relational.”
