Signed renga: Exploration of collaborative forms in sign language poetry

ABSTRACT

South African Sign Language (SASL) poetry is still exploring many forms of poetry genres. This article describes the recent development of a new ‘genre’ in sign language poetry: signed renga (group poetry). The article will outline the form – what it is, how it has developed and spread, and why it is an apparently successful poetic genre. A sketch of a workshop from Signing Hands Across the Water 2 (SHAW 2) will also be provided to illustrate how renga emerges out of group work. First we will briefly explain common features of signed renga, drawing on a body of signed renga in British, Irish and Swedish Sign Languages. The second half of the article is an in-depth analysis of one signed renga, titled South Africa, which emerged from the SHAW 2 festival, with a focus on transitions as collaborative performance using shared signing space and eye gaze direction.

KEYWORDS:

• sign language poetry
• South African sign language
• renga
• transition
• collaboration
• dialogism

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the poets who performed their poems and gave us the enjoyable data to study; and to the University of the Witwatersrand which hosted the SHAW 2 workshops and performances. We also thank Ruth Morgan who explained the signs in SASL poems and Rachel Sutton-Spence for the comments and inspiring discussions about sign language poetry. Thanks also to Deaf TV for documenting the video data as a part of Deaf heritage in South Africa. Illustrations in figures 1 and 20b are by Johanna Mesch.

Note on Contributors

Johanna Mesch is a Deaf, associate professor in sign language linguistics at the department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests are tactile signing, cross-linguistic comparisons of signed languages, corpus-based studies, and signed poetry.

Michiko Kaneko is a lecturer at the SASL department in the School of Literature, Language and Media at Wits University. She teaches sign linguistics and sign language literature. She is from Japan, and has been studying the forms of creative sign language that originate in Japan (namely, haiku and renga).

ORCID

Johanna Mesch http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0612-6304

Notes

1 Performed at the Bristol Sign Poetry Festival 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFq2o-y_yso>.

2 Performed at the Bristol Sign Poetry Festival 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuYo2d51lKA>.

3 Ibid.

4 See <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4yXP3Z4gqs>.

5 See <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdvalZLbr4E>.

6 Performed at the Bristol Sign Poetry Festival 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juCdHKuvUWw>.

7 Performed at the Bristol Sign Poetry Festival 2010.

8 From a renga performed at the Nordic Culture Festival of the Deaf 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IODYFj78Jeo>.

9 From a renga performed at the Nordic Culture Festival of the Deaf 2010.

10 Figures 12–21 from DeafTV programme, South Africa.