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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