At the International Deaf Dance Festival, Access and Expression Take Center Stage

“There’s tension… feel the tension… then drop it! Then from there we embrace, then let it go… then we try it again. Again.”

Inside the rehearsal room, Antoine Hunter’s instructions guide dancers as they sync beating hearts with stomping feet, sweat gliding over sinew while they tug at a prop — a thick, colorful rope. Outside the rehearsal room, his words are an allegory for life. For the deaf, finding community and harmony in an imperfect world is a constant pursuit.

Hunter’s Urban Jazz Dance Company, which he founded 18 years ago, brings these realities to the stage at the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival, a platform he launched in 2013 for deaf and hard-of-hearing artists. This year’s program, running Aug. 8–10 at the Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco, features ten dance companies, including groups from Colombia, Botswana and Jamaica.

Hunter’s company, which he runs with assistant director Zahna Simon, will perform a piece choreographed to highlight the systemic lack of access to education among deaf, disabled and BIPOC children. The performance, excerpted from a longer piece due to premiere this fall, is based on real stories from conversations Hunter has been having with parents, educators and lawyers.

A few months ago, Hunter was invited to participate in a private family discussion about an incident involving a Black, deaf plus child in Oakland — Hunter’s own home turf.

“Sometimes children have breakdowns; what they need is communication access, they need support, but because this was a Black child, most white officials who were trying to interact with this deaf plus child didn’t have ways to communicate,” said Hunter. Ultimately, because the boy wasn’t able to calm down, someone called the police, who arrived and confronted him — a familiar case of villainizing the victim.

Besides Hunter and the boy’s family, also present at the aftermath discussion were a lawyer, a school principal, an interpreter and the police.

“It really feels very frustrating because at some point everyone in that circle was talking about that child as if that child is an item. A child is not an item, a child is a child. It was just so frustrating, frustrating…” he said.

He chose to alchemize his frustration into art. “I asked permission to connect this to our dance,” he said. “When we see issues within the community, we want to find a way to dismantle that… through dance. Dance is powerful, it has the power to bring the community together, it heals the community as a whole.”

Hunter actively advocates for the rights of the deaf in different contexts — in prisons, in hospitals, among refugees — and is in contact with organizations that share his goals, like the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), HEARD (Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of the Deaf) and LEAD-K (Language Equality and Acquisition for Deaf Kids).

Recently, he has been reckoning with the government’s ongoing hostility towards the arts, the humanities and collectives like his, built on values like equity, diversity, identity and cultural pluralism. Hunter himself identifies as deaf, disabled, African-American, Indigenous — Cherokee and Blackfoot — and Two-Spirit.

Last year, his dance company held a camp for deaf and hard of hearing families at Yosemite. “We were hoping to do that this year, but we were notified on January 19 that that funding has been cut,” he said. The camp will take place at the Presidio instead. “We’ve got to make it happen without support.”

The deaf community, he said, is concerned about Medicaid cuts, and that the rising cost of living might render interpreters unaffordable. Consequently, deaf people will lose access, perpetuating the very problem his troupe seeks to dismantle through dance.

Despite everything, the idea of deafness as culture — not as disability — is growing. As an example, Hunter cites Sinners, the box-office smash recently released on streaming with an option to watch with Black American Sign Language, a dialect with its own unique rhythm.

All in all, Hunter wants this weekend’s festival to convey one simple message: “We’re more than just deaf.”

The 13th Annual Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival runs Aug. 8-10 at Dance Mission Theater (3316 24th St., San Francisco).

KQED interviewed Antoine Hunter with the help of an ASL interpreter.