Two Visual Languages Propel a Dream Role

In Ntozake Shange’s celebrated feminist choreopoem, through Dec. 8 at the Public, seven women of color, named after and dressed in different hues of the rainbow, explore trauma and resilience through movement and text. Wailes’ performance is captivating for the ease in which she weaves Camille A. Brown’s choreography with American Sign Language.

“That was a challenge,” Wailes said through an interpreter in an interview. “I didn’t want it to become too movement-based so that the language started to get lost.”

Dance runs deep in her body. Wailes, who became deaf after contracting meningitis just after her first birthday, has danced nearly all of her life. When she was around 3, a doctor suggested that she try a class. It was a way, she said, “to help me heal and deal with the world.”

Even outside of the studio, dance has served her well. “Dancing has always been a way of communicating with people who didn’t understand me,” she said. “It was a way of breaking down barriers between languages.”

“For Colored Girls” features a series of monologues. In the Lady in Purple’s, Wailes narrates the story of a mixed-race dancer who performs the role of an Egyptian goddess of love. The production’s director, Leah C. Gardiner, was impressed with Wailes’ elegant weaving of two visual languages, dance and ASL.

“I could request something,” Gardiner said, and “she would ask me questions and then take that information and put that into her body and translate that into ASL in relationship to the text.”

Wailes worked with Onudeah Nicolarakis, who is credited as the production’s director of ASL, to focus on making sign and spoken language work together, as well as imbuing the choreography with expressiveness and nuance.

“She didn’t just translate the words, she translated the experience and emotion,” Gardiner said. “One of my favorite moments in the show is when Alexandria turns upstage and is talking about how her hoop skirt falls. She gestures at her bottom and pulling the skirt down, but she does it kind of looking back. It’s cheeky and expressive.”

The role was not originally for a deaf actress, but in casting, Gardiner — with Shange’s approval — wanted to broaden the idea of what an African American woman could be. She also had another ambition in this production: To illuminate the idea of colorism, in which skin tone — whether lighter or darker — can lead to favoritism and discrimination within an ethnic group.

Wailes, who is half black, has a lighter complexion than the others onstage. “When Alexandria came in and auditioned there was, for me, the excitement of, Wow, maybe my dream of exploring colorism can come true,” Gardiner said. “And, oh my gosh, she’s also deaf? This is insane.”

“For Colored Girls” had its premiere at the Public in 1976, the year after Wailes was born. And that connection is meaningful to her. “As a deaf woman of color who grew up dancing,” she said she could see herself in the role. As she put it, “I felt like I needed to be doing this show at this time.”

Recently Wailes spoke about bringing ASL and movement together, listening with her body and the freedom that dancing gives her. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: How does dance break down barriers between languages?

A: It is in the body when you learn to listen. And you learn to listen differently as a dancer. Being deaf, we always use our eyes; it’s so critical for us to survive and to take in the world. So to bring in dancing is just an automatic extension of my way of life as a deaf person.

I was very lucky because in the last two years of high school, I transferred to the Model Secondary School for the Deaf. It was during the 1990s and they had a strong performing-arts program. I started to meet other deaf dancers.

Q: What did that give you?

More motivation and incentive to stay true to my path as an artist considering I never had anyone to look up to. I had no role model. A deaf woman of color? Dancing? (Laughs) I had to go, OK, if that’s not out there, I want to create it.

Q: How do you bring yourself to the character?

A: This is me in my true element as an actor as a dancer. I have seven siblings. We’re all girls. There are seven women in the show, and I’m the only deaf person in the cast and in my family.

Q: Are you generally very expressive when you sign?

A: Yes. I can turn it down and be less expressive. I’ve worked with (contemporary choreographer) Heidi Latsky for a few years. She had a piece, “Somewhere,” inspired by different renditions of “Over the Rainbow.” I told her that I wanted to challenge the notion of signing, which often tends to look so very beautiful and pastoral and emotive and expressive. I wanted to see signing used in an urban manner. I wanted it to feel gritty, edgy and just bigger — more like an attack in a positive way, like in your face.

Q: How did she work with you?

A: She worked with me on my expression. She said: “Don’t put it in your face. It’s not about putting on a show.” I understood, but it was a challenge because face is my voice. My expressions are my voice. But over time, it was freeing, because I was focusing on bringing American Sign Language and movement together.

Q: How do you find rhythm without hearing the words?

A: Signing naturally has a lot of musicality within it. The challenge is determining which signs best honor the length of the text, because in Ntozake’s text you often see the slashes or you see space or an ampersand.

How do I embody this physical language on top of a dancing language on top of trusting and working with the other actors who are speaking the lines that Ntozake wrote? Because a big difference between speaking and signing is I can keep signing, but you need to take a breath, right? There is a difference in the way that breath is used in both languages.

Q: This production explores the notion of colorism. How has skin tone affected you in your life?

A: I didn’t ask to look like this, do you know what I mean? (Laughs) So I was really grateful for Leah. She just got me. She understood the inherent challenges that I deal with in life because I’m always passing. I’m not going to deny that that privilege is there.

But I’ve had to suppress who I am — because the idea of who I am doesn’t match who I am inside. It’s an interesting tension, and it’s a constant dynamic that I’m negotiating all the time.

Q: Do you know why you took to dance as a deaf person?

A: Because it’s another language. I learned sign language and dance around the same time. Dance is a physical vocabulary and a way of communicating. Sometimes it relies on sound — but not always.

This article originally appeared in