Signdance Collective International: Carthage

Carthage explores the displacement, forced migration and trafficking of individuals, especially in the aftermath of wars. The piece is conceived as a hybrid dance theatre piece that incorporates live performance, music, movement, and languages spoken and signed.

Signdance Collective International was created by Isolte Avila and David Bower (Hugh Grant’s brother in Four Weddings) to develop a new choreographic language. Carthage is set in an imagined despoiled landscape that brings to mind the ancient city of Carthage, which was the centre of the Carthaginian Empire in antiquity, and which is currently a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia, and also the port city of Cartagena in Colombia, and its namesake city in Spain. The play on words in the Spanish language is “carta ajena,” which translates literally as “letter from afar.”

Carthage/Cartagena has four performers and a musician. The artists have developed a unique sign dance vocabulary which develops and unites the Afro-Cuban Dance with International Sign Dance theatre. The result of this combination, along with dramaturgical direction by Spanish Beatriz Cabur, makes for an exquisite, distinctive and comprehensible piece of work which speaks to the world.

The performance text Carthage is a series of ten multi-lingual letter song-poems from metaphorical places of dislocation. It is a text that explores the displacement, forced migration and trafficking of individuals, especially in the aftermath of wars. The piece is conceived as a hybrid dance theatre piece that incorporates live performance, music, movement, and languages spoken and signed.

One of the key themes woven into the text is the power of language and the struggle for many who face adversity; and as such cannot speak the language of the oppressor as eloquently and therefore are rendered disenfranchised This theme is amplified by the use of sign as another language that is also not widely understood. Yet invention and yearning for freedom by way of articulating a plea for freedom in a second language can render the language all the more poignant despite the fact. Carthage/Cartagena encapsulates and distils this dilemma perfectly in poetical terms. The spoken word in partnership with sign language and Afro-Cuban Dance Styles has the potential to deliver this crisis of communication straight to the heart bypassing all intellectual rumination and deflection, and in turn expose the devastating effects of slavery in no uncertain terms.