At rEvolver Festival, Catfish finds a theatrical language that both Deaf and hearing audiences can understand
Simran Gill’s groundbreaking new play is set to premiere live at the Upintheair Theatre event—integrating Sign Language and music you can feel
Catfish, with Simran Gill (middle).
rEvolver Festival runs May 24 to June 4; Catfish runs May 24, 26, 31, and June 1 at C-Lab
WHEN SIMRAN GILL was graduating from high school, she says she was told theatre training would not be an option.
“They said, ‘Oh, it’ll be really hard for me because of my voice, and I wouldn't be able to speak properly,” Gill, who was born hard of hearing, tells Stir through an ASL interpreter. “There’s not a lot of deaf or hard-of-hearing actors, and I think they just weren't aware that there were deaf actors.”
Gill would go on to prove them wrong. She is about to premiere Catfish at the upcoming rEvolver Festival—a Sign Language/English hybrid play she’s not only cowritten, but performs the lead in. At the same time, her show develops groundbreaking new ways to stage inclusive theatre—ones that don’t require an ASL interpreter to stand on the sidelines (a situation that can create what Gill calls the “ping-pong effect” for Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers).
Supported by Alley Theatre, Catfish has been built from the ground up with Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing artists, working Sign Language right into the performance—with an entire team of interpreters involved behind the scenes in its creation process—to fashion an inclusive experience. Even its codirection crosses cultures, with Chris Dodd (the Deaf artistic director of Edmonton’s Sound Off Deaf arts festival) and Gavan Cheema (the hearing co-artistic director of Vancouver’s Theatre Conspiracy) at the helm.
In Catfish, cowritten with Jess Amy Shead, Gill’s hard-of-hearing Michelle gets caught up in a web of lies when she misrepresents herself online, using her hearing friend's voice to attract the interest of the new guy at high school. When it’s time to meet in real life, Gill’s character has to come to terms with the fact she must accept herself before she can look for acceptance elsewhere. The playwright says it’s very much inspired by her own “journey of self-love”. Importantly, it’s also just a compelling story about the high school experience and the deception that can happen in online relationships.
The play manages to work in not just Deaf culture, but Michelle (and Gill’s) Punjabi identity as well.
Theatre artist Simran Gill.
“It’s about connecting those different parts of ourselves and connecting different people and coming together,” she says. “There are quite a lot of cultures being integrated. I feel like in a lot of situations you have a lot of cultures overlapping in people’s lives.”
On another level of experience, Catfish will also make use of high-tech Woojer Belts, a tactile audio platform that will allow its wearers to feel the vibrations and pulses of Ruby Singh’s score.
“The point is that the Deaf people will be able to feel similar experiences,” Gill explains. “If there’s, for instance, really energetic music, it will reflect that and they’ll be able to follow the excitement of the show. The hearing audience will be able to hear the music, so for the deaf audience, that’s a missing piece for them. Adding that experience may be really surprising for some of them.”
In all, Catfish has been years developing this piece—in the works ever since Gill met Shead in Alley Theatre’s 2017 production of The Ridiculous Darkness. It later debuted as an excerpted work-in-progress, online, at the pandemic-era rEvolver Festival of 2021.
Gill credits building relationships and networks to getting her play to production—not to mention perseverence. “If you don't do anything about it you wont get anywhere,” she says. “There’s a lot of work, one step at a time, to build yourself up higher.
“I'm really surprised, honestly, that this is happening,” she adds. “I’m excited that my first show is out—and I have my good friends involved in it as well.”
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