2007 Bob Holman and Stefa Zawerucha Interviews
Channel: RIT Libraries
Date: 2019-03-26

Summary by Joan Naturale. 2007 Bob Holman and Stefa Zawerucha Interviews. This video is from the Miriam and Kenny Lerner collection. Both are interviewed by Miriam Lerner.  Bob Holman discusses how ASL poetry is like orature and his exposure to the creative and playful work of Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner, the Flying Words duo. Peter has the ability to transmute dance, mime, theatre, and song into a great performance that is based on the body. ASL has whole-body communication that other poetries do not have. He shares his experience using an interpreter and how it enriched his poetry performance seeing it translated into ASL. The spotlight is on the poem and using interpreters help to make ASL poetry more visible in the world. The influence of Ginsberg and the Beat poets on the Deaf poets like Peter Cook is the spirit of loving and rebellion. The ASL poets fight for the existence of the Deaf community, of a minority whose voice is not being heard.  Steph describes her time at NTID as a rich and creative period in her life where she met talented Deaf artists like Peter Cook, Patrick Graybill, and Debbie Rennie. They shared their rich language, ASL with her, and she shared her knowledge of dance, which is like poetry. She attended poetry readings at Jazzberries and loved watching the Deaf poetry performances. She recalls a choreographic project she did with Kenny Lerner, Debbie Rennie, and David Fritz which they took to NYC for a dance theater workshop. It was about a couple and their aging process from young love to the bonds in the middle years and the permutation to old age. Debbie was exquisite and brought a full understanding of aging. She was able to age in front of your eyes and become a person in her 80s even though she was in her young 20s. She transformed her body and did movements that represented aging so it seemed real. NTID was like a Petri dish for Steph. Visual description: Bob Holman has round-rimmed glasses,  gray hair, a mustache, and a beard.  He is wearing a gray and black striped hat, a pink shirt, a tan sweater, and a black sweater. He is in front of the shelves of books. Stepha has pulled back reddish-brown hair, is wearing a blue tank,  a blue shirt over it, and blue jeans. She is in front of two paintings in The Dyer Arts Center.   For more information, please go to the Deaf Studies Archive finding aid link URL: https://archivesspace.rit.edu/repositories/2/resources/815

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"This project is supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation." https://www.clir.org/2018/01/clir-ann...