Eye Music will showcase poetry performance by American Sign Language masters
Affable and intense in a self-effacing way, Larry Polansky could easily be dubbed a renaissance man if he weren’t so modest about his far-ranging expertise. Musician, composer, software designer, experimental educator, and tireless scholar, Polansky is the force behind the upcoming—and unprecedented—Eye Music: American Sign Language Poetry and Performance Festival unfolding at UCSC this week. Gathering some of the masters of an artform created to be seen and not heard, Polansky has curated three days of live poetry performance and panel exchanges in a field rarely experienced by the hearing community.
“Signed languages are full languages, as rich as spoken ones,” says Polansky.
“Even English poetry is difficult, but ASL poetry really plays with the language. With signed poetry you’re adding yet another modality—physical gesture. The face, the body, the hand, space itself—all of this is really exploited in the poetry.” Anyone who has watched transfixed as an expert signer creates a full-body performance while communicating nuanced ideas, metaphors, and sentences knows what he means.
While at Dartmouth, where he held a chair in music for two decades before joining the UCSC faculty, Polansky followed his own eclectic line of inquiry. “I am interested in new ideas,” admits the inventor and explorer of algorithmically triggered melodies. One of those ideas was “the very different way that language gets formed” by American Sign Language. And so Polansky set out to learn it himself, taking years of class work, including a stint at Gallaudet University, the country’s leading university for the deaf. “After a life as a musician making sound that had no ‘meaning,’ I was curious about the opposite, a world with lots of meaning and no sound,” he says. Based at the Mills Center for Contemporary Music for ten years, Polansky helped develop the computer music language HMSL. His widely-recorded and performed compositions often utilize abstract sound explorations ranging from mutating jazz riffs to organized improvisations for strings, with gossamer electronic detours from a central event horizon.
While teaching music at Dartmouth, Polansky tried out an experimental class in ASL. “I wanted to do something with my interest in ASL, even though I’m a pretty lousy signer,” he says. In 10 weeks his students and guest scholars explored the breadth and scope of poetry and performance in American Sign Language. “Many non-deaf have no idea that there is a poetic tradition within the deaf community. I dug into the performance traditions—we all have these fringe communities as musicians—and found there’s a whole other world within ours that’s almost invisible. Translation is a real hurdle,” he admits. “We’ll have interpreters at the festival events, but not translators.” Poetry even in spoken language is difficult to translate, he reminds me, which is why we try to read poetry in its native language.
Polansky put together the upcoming Festival—Eye Music—the way he created his experimental ASL course. “I advocate for this community and I’ve gotten to meet the people whose work I love, and hopefully help a fascinating culture expand its reach.”
A Mellon Grant provided Polansky “a very generous amount of time and funds for traveling and meeting with this interesting community. I met as many of the key artists as I could,” he says—some of whom will be at Eye Music.
“I wanted to bring major folks from far away, as well as those within the local community.” He mentions visiting artists Karen Christie, Peter Cook, Patrick Graybill, as well as local activist poet and mentor, Ella Lentz. “She’s very involved in radical deaf politics. She’ll be at the festival.” Polansky believes that “people who come to these events will be impressed by the energy, eloquence and beauty of this work.”
Polansky’s own wide-ranging body of work converges in the quest to bring people and ideas into rich collaborative encounters. “I have a music life. One question tends to lead to another, each one suggests the next,” he says with a grin, and nods at an unfinished composition on a music stand. A signature work of musical patterns and variations is aptly titled The World’s Longest Melody. Polansky’s UCSC office is thick with keyboards, consoles, stacks of CDs and books, boxes of digital accessories, and at least one electric guitar. “I tend to write very adventurous music for guitar. The group who decided to do some of my music, a bunch of Belgians, young guys, they were attracted to my guitar music because it’s really hard,” he grins. “But they’re brilliant, they have the chops.”
Larry Polansky cops to never having grown up. “What better way can you live? I’m so lucky doing this when I get to do it with others.”
‘Eye Music: A Festival of American Sign Language Poetry’ is at UCSC, Nov. 12-15, free, open to the public. ASLfestival.ucsc.edu. PHOTO: Composer and musician Larry Polansky with a dobro guitar. CHIP SCHEUER
