In my minimal exposure, hearing impaired relied solely on dancer input. Fortunately they
felt the beat and that wasn’t ever an issue. Once they successfully went through the dance
(unless complicated) a couple times, they were fine. It’s the changes that will go off
kilter. However, they weren’t successful all night and I don’t think they returned at a
local event more than once.
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad
On Thursday, June 21, 2018, 10:10 PM, Bob Peterson via Callers
<callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
I call and I’ve a small hearing loss. It’s enough that I need hearing aids. Dancers have
to be quiet if there’s a question from the floor. Having a wireless helps a lot so I can
walk over to them. Partly due to my hearing I need to focus extra attention on making my
voice clear, too.
As for hearing impaired dancers, we had an extreme situation back in 2012. We had a small
“invasion” of deaf college students. One deaf guy came alone to few nights, and he really
liked contra dance so he brought his friends after the first night. Those of us with some
ASL (we’re in Boston) made attempts to interpret, but with dancers facing every which way
it didn’t help. Plus we lacked signs for the figures. They appreciated the attempts,
though. Mainly they just copied other dancers.
Not soon enough after this began we enlisted a professional interpreter (for free, we were
grateful) but couldn’t get those folks to come back. The plan was to have the interpreter
on stage. She gamely invented some signs for common calls.
Color me annoyed because the videos I have of that were lost in my Great Photo Drive
Disaster of 2016.
\Bob Peterson
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