Two opera singers, a pianist and two signing actors join forces to create a joyous merging of singing and sign language in a fully integrated performance called Song in Sign.
Created and produced by formidAbility, an inclusive opera company founded by partially sighted opera singer Joanne Roughton-Arnold, this show aims to highlight that British Sign Language (BSL) is also an “art form” and we can “make it centre stage, giving it the artistic respect that everything else has on stage”.
Here, we speak to Joanne Roughton-Arnold about her work at formidAbility and the research, development and production that went into creating Song in Sign. Also, find out how you can see the show for yourself!
Who is Joanne Roughton-Arnold?
Joanne Roughton-Arnold is a partially sighted opera singer originally from New Zealand and now living in the UK. She has Ocular Albinism with subsequent congenital nystagmus.
Joanne began as a violinist and came over to the UK to get lessons from a Hungarian violin teacher in Oxford. Three years later, she went to Trinity College of Music in London to do a post-grad violin course.
While at Trinity College, Joanne chose a second subject in vocal studies. It was then that she slowly started to think that singing was the direction she wanted to be going in.
Following her studies at Trinity and three years of singing lessons, Joanne went to the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire to do a Master’s in voice studies.
From there, Joanne has done performances at the Investec Opera Holland Park and research and development (R&D) at the Royal Opera House. She even got involved in creating the music score for the Netflix film Rising Phoenix, a documentary about the Paralympic Games.
She is also a member of the British Paraorchestra, which has a mix of disabled and non-disabled musicians performing together. During the pandemic, they did some filming for Sky Arts, which included a six-part series called Reinventing the Orchestra.
Singing with the British Paraorchestra was a massive inspiration for Joanne and made her think about what she could do to make opera welcoming and accessible to disabled artists and audiences. This led to her idea of creating and launching formidAbility.
The launch and development of inclusive opera company formidAbility
formidAbility is believed to be the UK’s only majority disability-led opera company. Its trailblazing work putting accessibility at the heart of the creative process is attracting interest from many major arts organisations.
formidAbility began with Joanne and a friend called Holly Mathieson who is a conductor. It has now grown to six people on the board, most with lived experiences of disability and the performing arts.
The company’s overall mission is to make performing arts, and specifically opera, inclusive and accessible to everyone at all venues and events for both disabled performers and audiences.
Joanna explains how formidAbility started and how it has developed over the past five years:
“It’s been quite a rollercoaster ride. We started in 2019 and our first production was a double bill of two one-woman operas, each one about 45 minutes long. With a small ensemble of instrumentalists on stage, and we were merging opera with signed dance, like BSL, but extended it to dance and that went really well.
“Then Covid came along, and we were unable to do anything physical. But we applied to the Arts Council, and we got a Covid emergency grant, which let us just stabilise a little bit financially for that period, and let us commission a new work because I figured composers and writers could still work remotely. We commissioned a writer and a composer to write something about what was happening in the world at that crazy time. So they wrote a piece based on the falling of the Colston statue in Bristol, which is called The Bridge Between Breaths.
“It’s a really interesting piece of operatic work that is about something very real and tangible and relevant to so many people. We did some R&D on it – when we were able to come together in a space but with all the Covid precautions – as part of some work at the Tête à Tête Opera Festival in 2020, where we spent a few days exploring the first act of this opera and then we filmed and showed it online as a kind of live watch party through the Tête à Tête Opera Festival and got some feedback.
“We learnt lots from that and it was interesting. That particular piece got put aside for a while. Instead, we continued thinking about other things. The rest of the pandemic was really tricky for us because it was such a new company. We didn’t qualify for the Cultural Recovery Fund. There was just nothing coming in and nothing we could do. So we had to wait. But I spent that time talking to people, thinking about what we might do once the world was going to open again and how we develop as a company.
Song in Sign summary
Be transported to a New Zealand forest in Dame Gillian Whitehead’s Awa Herea (“Braided Rivers”), smile through tears in the world premiere of a new take on Oscar Wilde’s famous story, The Happy Prince, composed by Rylan Gleave and written by Max Chase.
Song in Sign is all about bringing people together! A fully integrated signed song performance featuring soprano Joanne Roughton-Arnold, tenor Ben Thapa, pianist Nigel Foster and BSL actors Rhiannon May and Petre Dobre, who interact onstage in a joyous celebration of energy and emotion. The Signed Song was directed by Caroline Parker with BSL consultancy from Daryl Jackson.
So far, the show has been performed at three music conservatoires – Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
The show’s next stop is on Friday 1st March 2024 at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, which has a BSL English and Drama course.
Joanne told us at the shows they’ve performed so far, she has received some incredible responses and praise from audiences, particularly those from the Deaf community.
She said: “We’ve had so many people from the Deaf community coming up to me and saying, ‘No one’s doing this, no one’s working like this and we love it. And now I want to go and see some opera.’ So there is this whole audience out there that have not tried opera because they didn’t think it was for them and now, we’ve made them feel like they actually want to try it, which is brilliant!”
Once Joanne has filed her report on these four shows, she hopes they can perform Song in Sign at more venues on multiple dates so more people can experience it in person and virtually.
The research and development process of Song in Sign
Joanna shared what led to her getting the funding and creative team to start researching and developing her new show Song in Sign:
“I also belong to the Engender network, which is hosted by the Royal Opera House. It’s for women and non-binary people working in opera in any capacity. It’s all about making opera more inclusive. So I went along to lots of their online meetings and spoke at one of them about inclusion and opera, the need to bring in more disabled people, which landed really strongly and the text of it is published on our website as a blog called formidAble Voices.
“They had a new mentoring scheme on the Engender network and I was fortunate enough to get one of the six places where I was paired with another member of the network. We had about three months together where we had conversations about what I wanted to do and finding ways to develop. It was really good to put our heads together – new eyes, new ideas – and work with someone who’s working in a completely different part of the industry to me. That was brilliant, really encouraging
“We went to a fundraising event hosted by Unlimited online, which was about how to get funding as a disabled artist. As a result of that, I got put in touch with a relationship manager at Arts Council England, Terry Adams, who was amazing and a lovely guy. He was a go-to person for advice on how to go about applying for funding.
“Because we’re a disability organisation, we can’t fall into the Arts Council’s priority applicants pool. This is why we got access to a relationship manager, which you don’t normally get unless you’re a national portfolio organisation. So he was really encouraging and helpful. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the funding, but it’s just giving you that insight on how to write these formidable applications because they can feel pretty daunting.
“We got some funding from them [Arts Council England] as a small grant for some recent development of a new idea I had, which was to take this idea of working with Deaf artists to another level. I had this idea to do a concert with some BSL working alongside us in sync. That idea grew, and eventually, we used the grant to commission a new work with two singers, a pianist and two Deaf actors.
“I reached out to a friend of mine who I work with at Paraorchestra, Rylan Gleave. He’s a fantastic composer. When he was studying in Glasgow, he learnt BSL at a high level and so he was already really interested in the idea of merging BSL with opera. He had put BSL with another work in the past. He was really up for it and wrote us this work, based on The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. He worked with his friend, Max Chase, who’s a writer who adapted the text so it would fit with the requirements for what we had.
“Then we did some research and developments on that in 2022 and played on how we could merge song with sign. We learnt lots from that and then we wrote many funding applications to take it to the next level. It took five goes until we finally got the funding for what we’re doing now, the full production and the UK tour of Song in Sign.”
Song in Sign production and accessibility features
Joanne then went into more detail about her idea for the show, how this idea differs from traditional opera and the importance of including BSL within the performance:
“I had the idea of bringing sign and classical music singing together. I was originally thinking about a song recital, which is normal in the classical world, you’ve got the pianist and you’ve got the singer standing in the curve of the piano. The singer normally stands and delivers this beautiful song, and we’re all taught to tell the story with our voices. You might do a bit of gesture but it’s not a staged performance. It’s just usually quite static.
“So I thought it would be really interesting to play with this with signing. Can we get actors to sign? Not just at a normal pace. If you go to an opera where they have a BSL interpreter, they’re on the edge of the stage and signing at you.
“They do amazing work and my mind is always blown by how the interpreter can stand there and interpret an entire opera with multiple characters is just extraordinary.
“But talking to my Deaf friends and Deaf colleagues, they talk about it like trying to watch a ping pong match with your eyes. Either you’re watching what’s happening on the stage and then you miss the signing, or you look to the left or right at the interpreter but then you’ve missed what’s happening on the stage. It’s really hard and exhausting I should imagine, mentally, to be flicking back and forth, back and forth, and trying to keep up.
“So I thought, wouldn’t it be more interesting to make signing that gets viewed not only as an access tool but to make it centre stage, giving it the artistic respect that everything else has on stage and also see if we could get the signing to happen in sync with the music. So it’s like showing visually the energy and the emotion of music and being a really visual expression of something that the hearing audience is getting aurally.”
She concluded: “It then became an idea of making it with a lot more action going on stage. So Song in Sign blurs the lines between the traditional song recital and opera by adding movement and stage directions.”
Song in Sign incorporates many accessibility features that can benefit both the performers and the audience with different impairments, all the while keeping traditional elements of an opera performance.
Joanna highlighted the importance and beauty of the piano but with the need for more space on stage: “We’ve put the piano to the side of the stage. Still very important, still very much a beautiful thing that’s part of the stage. We use it as part of the staging, this lovely grand piano. But most of the stage is clear, so the singers and actors are free to move around it and interact with each other as equals.
She continued: “We also have audio description. I thought normally in a concert audio description isn’t needed because it’s a static thing. And yet there is a lot to see. There’s so much excitement and body language of the musicians. This is something Rhiannon and Petre have been talking about. They enjoy music by watching the lights, watching the way people are playing and so on.
“But I thought we’ve got a cater for all our sight-impaired friends as well. So we’ve got a wonderful audio describer called Mo Pickering-Symes working with us who’s actually a performance poet. She sat in rehearsals and watched and had lots of discussions with us. She wrote a really beautiful script, which uses lovely poetic language to describe what’s happening on stage and tries to relay the same beauty in her voice and her text. as people who are seeing the show.”
She added: “We live-streamed the show from Manchester and it’s still available to watch and it’s got her audio description in there.”
Joanne then explained the multiple purposes for captions: “We also put captions up on a big screen at the back of the stage so that anyone who can’t hear and doesn’t sign can still follow what’s being sung. Normally in an opera, the only captions you get are in English if we’re singing in a different language. In Song in Sign, we’re singing in English, French, German, and Māori, but we put the captions up for everything, including the English because it’s more accessible.”
As well as accessibility in the show for the audience, there is also the need for reasonable adjustments for the performers too. Joanne explained some of the many ways they adapt the show to accommodate the Deaf actors, which includes the use of BSL interpreters and captions:
“The challenging thing, of course, for Song in Sign is memorising everything. As a singer, we’re used to that but we have all these extra clues to help us. The music helps us to remember our words and what we’re supposed to be doing on stage.
“But if you take away one of those elements, such as being able to hear the music, and you just have to try and remember what to do and all that text at the right time at the right pace, it would be incredibly hard.
“That’s what our actors are doing because they’re both deaf. One of them hears a bit in the lower register and the other hears a bit in the higher register. But they haven’t got those clues that we have as hearing people.
“So we brought in a couple of screens on stage. On one of them, they can see the captions in English just so they know where we are and they’ve got a musician backstage who is making sure the right captions are coming at the right time following the music, both for the audience and the actors.
“On the other screen, they’ve got one of the interpreters backstage on the screen signing the text we’re doing. But it’s not the same as the signing on stage because what they sign on the stage is much more creative, a bigger version, and they have more interaction with each other.”
The cast and crew also have processes to support the Deaf actors in being able to communicate and follow what’s going on during rehearsals. This includes usually having three interpreters in the room translating the singers as they sing and interpreting when the piano is playing and having captions on the wall.
Joanne said: “In the rehearsal room we had a really interesting process for integrating our two art forms (I think BSL is an art form – it’s such a beautiful language), where everyone would gather around the piano. With Nigel, our pianist, Ben and I would sing the song to our Deaf director Caroline Parker and BSL Creative Consultant Daryl Jackson and our two Deaf actors would stand around the piano and feel the piano and watch Nigel’s fingers as he played.
“So we would perform the song for them and give them a taste of it and they would ask any questions about the background for the song – ‘Who is it? Who are these people? Who are the characters? Where is it? Why are they singing it? How are we singing it? Where are we stretching longer notes? Is there some other clues in the music?’
“We would separate. Ben, Nigel and I would rehearse and polish the music while the actors, the director and the BSL consultant would go and work on their translation of the text into BSL and gesture how they interact. They would come together and try and coordinate and see where things needed to be longer or shorter, or whatever, and film it, so that would have a reference point to look back at and see what we did.
“And for us, learning staging, that was really helpful to have those videos to look back on, and that’s not something we really do in the rehearsal room. We’re usually scribbling on our music making notes, but actually having that resource to come back to is a brilliant example of access helping everybody in the room.”
Watch Song in Sign in Glasgow
Song in Sign will have its fourth and final currently scheduled performance at the Stenson Hall, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) in Glasgow on Friday 1st March 2024 at 1pm.
The day before the concert, formidAbility will be presenting a workshop to the students in the conservatoire. This has been developed by Aga Serugo-Lugo and fomidAbility’s artistic team and will be interactive with the students; teaching them how to integrate access into their work as performers/practitioners/staff from the word ‘go’. They will also be looking at teaching them critical skills such as data collection and evaluation, as this is a key professional skill to have in mind when applying for funding!
Further details and tickets are available at the RCS box office.
Also, a week before on Saturday 24th February from 2pm to 4pm, you are welcome to attend a community workshop, which is intended to engage with the disabled communities in Scotland. These are being developed by Joanne and Ruth Montgomery, an absolute expert in the field.
For further information and to book a place in the workshop, email Ellen Booth at ellen.booth.eb@gmail.com
To find out more about formidAbility and how you can get involved, visit the website and/or email info@formidability.org to sign up for the mailing list.
You can also follow Joanne Roughton-Arnold on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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