Six per­formers from integ­rated com­pany Equal Voices Arts, dressed simply in grey, black, and white, enact stor­ies explor­ing Deaf cul­ture for Deaf and hear­ing audi­ences. Stor­ies such as flir­ta­tions at the swim­ming pool and get­ting bus­ted for speed­ing (hil­ari­ous!) are con­tras­ted with more touch­ing stor­ies.

The per­formers Kylie Wil­lis, Alex Lodge, Mihailo Lad­je­vac, Shaun Fahey, Kelly Quirke and Joanne Klaver have dif­fer­ing levels of train­ing and exper­i­ence how­ever they all have a high level of pre­ci­sion in mime and phys­ic­al storytelling. The setup for each story is skil­fully acted. Usu­ally there is a main char­ac­ter in the story who is then sup­por­ted by oth­er char­ac­ters.  Some­times I wanted the incid­ent­al char­ac­ters to dial their per­form­ance back a bit so the main story could stay in the spot­light.  (In the Q&A the dir­ect­or Laura Haughey con­fesses that some­times the act­ors start impro­vising and she’s nev­er quite sure where they’re going to end up.) Musi­cian Andy Dug­gan is on stage. His music fol­lows the action on stage which affects the audi­ence, which in turn affects the act­ors – even if they can’t hear what he’s play­ing.

I love a bilin­gual theatre piece. Equal Voices Arts set out to “pur­pose­fully explore the fusion of NZSL, mime, speech and phys­ic­al storytelling”. I look for­ward to the com­pany devel­op­ing and grow­ing more shows like this funny & mov­ing work.

Note: A form­ally NZSL inter­preted Q&A between the cre­at­ors of the piece and the audi­ence is held after every show.