Theatre : The village of the deaf

THE VILLAGE OF THE DEAF
By Léonore Confino

A luminous tale about the impoverishment of language.

Youma, fourteen years old and deaf, lives in Okionuk, a village lost in the north of the globe where the inhabitants possess a treasure: their language. She observes the shifts in her polar paradise, when a merchant arrives to sell useless and indispensable objects. The villagers have no money? He offers them to pay in words. A hundred words for a toaster. The language disappears, little by little. Non-essential terms are eliminated, then the others. The shortage of vocabulary stirs up violence and rivalries. Youma and his interpreter Gurven have come to alert us: they are the only ones who have kept a language of resistance... that of signs.

Director: Catherine Schaub
Assisted by: Agnès Harel
With : Jérôme Kircher and Ariana Rivoire
Set design: Emmanuel Clolus
Lighting: Thierry Morin
Sound creation: R. Jericho
Compagnie Productions du Sillon