Deaf West Theatre Company is a North Hollywood, California-based cultural institution serving as a model for deaf theatre worldwide. Founded in 1991, by Ed Waterstreet, it is noted for being the first professional resident Sign Language Theatre in the western half of the United States. Deaf West Theatre productions, actors and directors have won more than 80 theatre awards for artistic merit.
Under the artistic direction of its founder, Ed Waterstreet, the company’s art-deco complex in the NoHo Arts District of North Hollywood includes a 90-seat theatre, complete with a state-of-the-art sound system, sub-woofers under the raked seating, an infrared headphone system, and captioning capabilities. The theatre is within a ten-minute drive of many major film production studios including Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, NBC, and Columbia/Tri-Star.
Deaf West Theatre Inc., was founded to directly improve and enrich the cultural lives of the 1.2 million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals who live in the Los Angeles area. DWT provides exposure and access to professional theatre, filling a void for deaf artists and audiences.
DWT serves the cultural, educational, social and employment needs of its constituents. DWT is an institution for the discovery and exploration of artists' identities and stature as artists. Through the medium of Sign Language Theatre, a legacy of deaf culture is created, shared, and preserved.
Presenting adaptations of classics, contemporary and original works, DWT is dedicated to the production of theatre of the highest artistic quality, which nurtures and promotes the talents of its actors, writers, directors and designers. DWT productions are presented in American Sign Language with simultaneous translation in English, providing for all an enhanced theatrical experience.
Deaf West Theatre's most notable accomplishment is bringing a revival of Big River to the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway in 2003.
Famous quotes containing the words deaf, west and/or theatre:
“and the deaf soul
struggles, strains forward, to lip-read what it needs:
and something is said, quickly,
in words of cloud-shadows moving and
the unmoving turn of the road, something
not quite caught ...”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
—William James (1842–1910)