عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Varieties

Songs of Silence: Young Actors Perform Indonesia’s First Deaf Musical

Members of theater troupe Fantasi Tuli (Deaf Fantasy) perform a show titled "Senandung Senyap" (Songs of Silence), during Indonesia's first musical with mostly deaf artists, in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 26, 2024. (Reuters)
Members of theater troupe Fantasi Tuli (Deaf Fantasy) perform a show titled "Senandung Senyap" (Songs of Silence), during Indonesia's first musical with mostly deaf artists, in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 26, 2024. (Reuters)
TT
TT

Songs of Silence: Young Actors Perform Indonesia’s First Deaf Musical

Members of theater troupe Fantasi Tuli (Deaf Fantasy) perform a show titled "Senandung Senyap" (Songs of Silence), during Indonesia's first musical with mostly deaf artists, in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 26, 2024. (Reuters)
Members of theater troupe Fantasi Tuli (Deaf Fantasy) perform a show titled "Senandung Senyap" (Songs of Silence), during Indonesia's first musical with mostly deaf artists, in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 26, 2024. (Reuters)

In a Jakarta theatre, the music pulsed from speakers as a group of young artists danced in a musical, bathed in multicolor stage lights. But no one was singing.

Theatre troupe Fantasi Tuli (Deaf Fantasy) was performing Indonesia's first musical with mainly deaf artists and crew on Saturday, using screens around the stage showing dialogue and lyrics as actors performed with their facial expressions and hand signs.

The musical "Senandung Senyap" (Songs of Silence) depicts the plight of students in a middle school for children with disabilities. Directors Hasna Mufidah and Helga Theresia created it to raise awareness and promote the use of sign language.

"My hope is, going forward, inclusivity can be strengthened, that between deaf and hearing people, hearing is not superior - we're equal," Mufidah, who is deaf, said through Indonesian sign language.

Involving more than 60 deaf actors and crew, aged 16 to 40, the musical took three months to prepare. It is inspired by Deaf West Theater in the United States, Helga said.

The performance examines special-needs education in Indonesian schools, where deaf students are often taught with an emphasis on speech training and lip-reading, more than on sign language, amid a wider debate about the best education methods for children with hearing disability.

Some in the deaf community argue oral education can lead to a sense of alienation, and that sign language is a more natural way to communicate for them. Proponents of such a method say it could better integrate people with hearing disability with the more dominant hearing community.

For deaf actor Hanna Aretha Oktavia, the musical was her introduction to sign language and the wider deaf community.

"Throughout dialogue rehearsals we had to use as much expressions as possible and to follow the storyline," Hanna said.

"What's interesting is in rehearsals we have to feel the tempo and vibrations and match them with the choreography. I think that's the most intriguing part because I love to dance. And we paid close attention to the beats with the help of hearing aids. We use big speakers to help guide us," she said.

More than 2 million of Indonesia's 280 million people have a hearing disability, including 27,983 students in special-needs schools.

Most Viewed

 
 
Varieties

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
TT
TT

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)

We watch video after video, consuming the world on our handheld devices in bites of two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving pictures — “film” — because it comes the closest to approximating the world that we see and experience. This is, after all, 2024, and video in our pocket — ours, others', everyone's — has become our birthright.
But sometimes — even in this era of live video always rolling, always recording, always capturing — sometimes the frozen moment can enter the eye like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that echoes long after the moment was captured. That's what happened this past week in Beirut, through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and the photographs he captured.
When Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated Beirut apartment building Tuesday after Israel announced it would be targeted as part of military operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal in mind — only one. "All I thought of," he says, “was photographing the missile while it was coming down.”
He found a safe spot. He ensured a good angle. He wasn't stressed, he said; like many photographers who work in such environments, he had been in situations like this one before. He was ready.
When the attack came — a bomb, not a missile in the end — Hussein swung into action. And, unsurprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.
Time slowed down
The sequence of images he made bursts with the explosive energy of its subject matter.
In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a weird and obtrusive interloper in the scene. It is not yet noticed by anyone around it, ready to bring its destruction to a building that, in moments, will no longer exist. The building's balconies, a split-second from nonexistence, are devoid of people as the bomb finds its mark.
These are the kind of moments that video, rolling at the speed of life or even in slow motion, cannot capture in the same way. A photo holds us in the scene, stops time, invites a viewer to take the most chaotic of events and break it down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that actual life could not.
In another frame, one that happened micro moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let's repeat that for effect, since even as recently as a couple generations ago photographs like this were rare: in the process of exploding.
Pieces of building are shooting out in all directions, in high velocity — in real life. But in the image they are frozen, outward bound, hanging in space awaiting the next seconds of their dissolution — just like the bomb that displaced them was doing milliseconds before. And in that, a contemplation of the destruction — and the people it was visited upon — becomes possible.
Tech gives us new prisms to see the world
The technology to grab so many images in the course of little more than one second — and do it in such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.
So to see these “stills,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, intrepidity and technology — an exercise in freezing time, and in giving people the opportunity to contemplate for minutes, even hours, what took place in mere seconds. This holds true for positive things that the camera captures — and for visitations of violence like this one as well.
Photography is random access. We, the viewers of it, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We go backward and forward in time, at will. We control the pace and the speed at which dizzying images hurtle at us. And in that process, something unusual for this era emerges: a bit of time to think.
That, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a moving-picture world — and the power of what Bilal Hussein captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.