Little Bear can’t hear Dad Bear calling, but feels the floor vibrate with heavy footsteps... Little Bear can’t catch the funny joke at school when friends are laughing but feels the crunch of snow on frozen pavements.
The play is Raymond Antrobus’ Can Bears Ski, a fun piece which also comes with important messages, courtesy of The Pied Piper Theatre Company and Deafinitely Theatre and heading to The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford on Saturday, January 27 at 11am, 2pm and 4pm and Shoreham’s Ropetackle Arts Centre on Sunday, January 28 at 11am and 2.30pm
The play is Raymond Antrobus’ Can Bears Ski, a fun piece which also comes with important messages, courtesy of The Pied Piper Theatre Company and Deafinitely Theatre and heading to The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford on Saturday, January 27 at 11am, 2pm and 4pm and Shoreham’s Ropetackle Arts Centre on Sunday, January 28 at 11am and 2.30pm
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FunTranscript
00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor for Sussex Newspapers. It's really
00:06 lovely to speak to Stephen Stewart, who is on the road with a show which will be coming
00:10 to Guildford and Shoreham at the end of January. Important dates because the show is Can Bears
00:16 Ski? which is actually a mishearing and it's a play about hearing, about not hearing and
00:22 about struggling to hear. Tell me about it, what's it saying, what's it setting out to
00:27 do in terms of young people who might struggle to hear?
00:32 I think that quite a few things actually. I think ideally we would like to show for
00:39 a non-hearing audience the stages of being diagnosed as hard of hearing or deaf. For
00:49 non-hearing audiences we would very much like to kind of create something that mirrors their
00:54 experience of things that they might go through or processes that they might be going through
01:00 in the time. And also I think for parents just kind of a blueprint of what do you do
01:05 in these situations when you suspect that your child is deaf or you kind of know something's
01:11 a bit different there and you don't know what to do. So I think that the different demographics
01:16 definitely get different things.
01:18 It sounds fascinating. It's all set around the story of Little Bear and you were talking
01:22 about it as being a hearing journey, the point being that there's a question of realisation,
01:27 awareness and then with that what do you do about it? So it's people realising that Little
01:32 Bear is struggling.
01:33 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So in our story it's certainly kind of flagged up by Dad Bear,
01:43 by Teacher Bear.
01:44 Who's you.
01:45 Yeah, and one of Little Bear's friends as well kind of noticed something's going on
01:50 there and all of that information kind of gets processed through Dad Bear and he decides
01:55 to.
01:56 So what's it doing? Is it about awareness for hearing people, that there are people
02:01 who struggle or is it offering comfort, reassurance to people who struggle or is it both?
02:06 I think absolutely both. I think it is to raise awareness of the deaf experience and
02:10 that's what as a company we've tried to do in this play and get it as close to what deaf
02:18 children will go through but also I think like I said before like just to relate to
02:24 deaf children and kind of make something for them. A lot of things aren't made for them
02:31 so I think it's so nice to see when we, we have all kinds of audiences but when we have
02:37 our non-hearing audiences in and just to see their faces when they realise oh my god that
02:41 character's signing or when we're in the audiologist and it takes them a second to work out we're
02:46 in the audiologist and then they're like I know where they are.
02:50 Really interesting thing is that you enable people who have hearing to experience what
02:55 it is to not have hearing or to be struggling with hearing don't you?
03:00 Absolutely, absolutely and we also do, we show it from the point of view of Little Bear
03:05 so anything that Little Bear doesn't hear or mishears the audience won't hear or will
03:10 mishear.
03:11 So you will mumble that?
03:13 Yeah so we use a series of mumbling or blah blah blah blah whilst talking to Little Bear
03:18 just to kind of highlight to the audience how sometimes deaf or hard of hearing people
03:25 can hear different things and not be able to make things out or just to catch the odd
03:30 word we do that quite a lot where just one word in the line is spoken clearly and the
03:35 rest is mumbled.
03:36 And the title is an example of that isn't it?
03:41 Absolutely the title Can Bear Ski is actually not what is said in Little Bear but it's what
03:48 Little Bear hears over and over again and it's because of context clues that Little
03:52 Bear comes to that realisation because in the first scene Dad Bear is watching a bear
03:58 ski and asks a Little Bear a question to which Little Bear interprets that as Can Bear Ski.
04:06 It sounds fantastic, it sounds incredibly rewarding too.
04:09 Good luck with the future tour and you will be at Guildford and Shoreham end of January.
04:14 Lovely to speak to you.
04:15 Thank you very much.
04:16 Thank you.
04:17 [BLANK_AUDIO]