ASL

Newrest ASL seeks to delist from NSE

Newrest ASL Nigeria Plc has filed application seeking to delist its entire shares from the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE).

The NSE yesterday confirmed that it has received application from the board of directors of Newsrest ASL, kick-starting the formal regulatory approval process for a voluntary delisting of its shares from the Exchange.

In the application filed by Newrest ASL’s stockbroker, Helix Securities Limited, the company is seeking to voluntary delist its entire 634 million ordinary shares of 50 kobo each from the Daily Official List of the Exchange.

Head, Listings Regulation, Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Godstime Iwenekhai, stated that the voluntary delisting was due to inability of Newrest ASL to meet up with the 20 per cent free float requirement of the Exchange.

The company stated that in line with the provisions of extant rules, it has opened and deposited sufficient funds to settle minority shareholders in an Escrow Account with Zenith Bank Plc to be managed by Meristem Registrars Limited.

Rule 1.10 of the Rules for Delisting of Equity Securities from the Daily Official List of the Exchange states that: the Issuer shall set aside funds sufficient to purchase the interest of all shareholders who expressed their dissent to the resolution to de-list the Issuer; and the funds shall be domiciled with a Registrar or a Custodian duly registered by and in good standing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Role Play: Practicing to Enter a Profession

After nearly two years of classes in American Sign Language (ASL) and interpreting, the students of Waubonsee's Interpreter Training Program (ITP) put all their skills to use. Students who are close to completing the program have learned the basics and explored the nuances of ASL, the natural language of Deaf people. They have explored the Deaf culture and have completed all the classes in fingerspelling and linguistics. With all of this complete, they are ready to bring it all together at an event called the Role Play.

These students want to become sign language interpreters. The number of Deaf people who use ASL is estimated to be between 250,000 and 500,000 in the United States and Canada. Today's students will soon be new interpreters and will be working in the community between Deaf and hearing people to help communication flow smoothly. Interpreters work in a variety of settings: educational (k-12 and college) medical (physicians appointments, testing and hospitalization), artistic (plays and concerts), and the community (everything from business to conferences and speaking events).

Every April, the current class of Interpreter Training Program students has a chance to try several settings in which sign language interpreters work. This is only possible with volunteers from the Deaf Community. Most of the current participants have been coming for years. They know their participation and feedback to the students is crucial to them fine-tuning their skills.

Throughout the Role Play, scenarios run concurrently. Each scenario is between hearing and Deaf people in a particular setting so the student interpreters can interpret the "stressful situation" without worrying about doing any damage if they err in their interpreting. They gain experience, knowledge and confidence. The players might be at a restaurant planning a party, renting an apartment, or interviewing at a daycare center. Scenarios may include a worried parent whose child is brought home by the police, with an interpreter conveniently by their side. The "police officer" sees flying hands as Deaf parents question the police about what their errant child did. Would the officer understand what is happening? Ah, the officer hears a confident voice interpreting the flying hands.

Some of the scenarios call for two participants to play parents or co-owners of a business. The interplay between two Deaf characters can be fast-paced and challenging but it usually ends in laughter as the scene can become very entertaining as the Deaf participants ad-lib. At the close of each scenario, the Deaf and hearing participants give feedback to the students. As an all-day event, the group will pause for a few breaks to socialize and grab some lunch, but each student will interpret several scenarios.

In the spring of 2018, the hearing participants were played by the students in the first year sign language classes who wanted to enter the ITP the following year. Thus, most of the current 2019 ITP students got a sneak-peak into their future that day by volunteering to play those roles. Besides being able to see those who were a year ahead of them and where they were headed, they had the opportunity to socialize with the Deaf participants on and off during the day. Now, the group who volunteered the previous year are looking forward to this milestone in their education. They know where they are headed. They are trying on various interpreting hats, preparing to go out into the world and start their career as a working interpreter.

Waubonsee Community College's Interpreter Training Program was the first-of-its-kind in Illinois when it was established in 1975. It remains at the forefront of study thanks to the use of digital technology. Visit www.waubonsee.edu/itp to learn more about the program and how you can earn an associate degree in this important career field.

Cassie Coburn, Assistant Professor of Interpreter Training and Sign Language

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Here’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ like you’ve never seen it, with the star-crossed lovers bridging the gap between American Sign Language and English

Wooing Juliet from beneath her balcony, Romeo proclaims, “O, speak again, bright angel!”

The star-crossed teen lovers do a lot of talking in Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet,” which contains some of the richest, most passionately lyrical verse in the Bard of Avon’s canon. And the pair will have plenty to say in the new ACT Theatre production — but they will be speaking the speech in two different languages.

Noted deaf actor Joshua Castille, as Romeo, will discourse primarily through American Sign Language (ASL). And winsome Gabriella O’ Fallon, as his fair Juliet, will deliver her lines in spoken English.

At a recent rehearsal of the pivotal ball scene, where the two offspring of the feuding Capulet and Montague families first set eyes on one another (and clamp lips), director John Langs was refining some complex choreography with the ensemble. He was assisted by several ASL interpreters moving around and through the action to translate his comments for the cast’s two deaf performers, Castille and Howie Seago.

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At one point, Langs spent time concentrating on a speech by Romeo that was simultaneously signed by Castille and vocalized by Amy Thone, who also plays Juliet’s nurse. The two ran through the monologue again and again, aiming to more perfectly synchronize the tempo of the signs and the words.

“Good, good,” Langs encouraged them, “it’s really coming along.”

Blending hearing and deaf actors in the same production has gained traction in Seattle theaters. For instance, last year Castille portrayed the title character in a musical version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” at 5th Avenue Theatre. And Seattle Children’s Theatre has featured deaf actors in numerous shows, including Seago, a veteran of the National Theatre of the Deaf and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, who is playing Friar Laurence in ACT’s “Romeo + Juliet.”

But how to simultaneously convey to both a hearing and deaf audience some of the most glorious, complex verbiage in Western literature — including blank verse garlanded with metaphors (“My lips, two blushing pilgrims stand …”) and similes (“My love is as boundless as the sea …”) — in a text that also interweaves numerous sonnets (14-line rhymed poems)?

It is a precision-tooled undertaking, Langs acknowledged by phone, during a quick dinner break between rehearsals. The director, who is also the artistic head of ACT, has staged “Romeo and Juliet” twice before — in a lovestruck, kinetic modern-day version for Seattle Shakespeare Company in 2005, and with a student cast at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

“I also played Romeo in high school,” he revealed, “not very well but very earnestly.”

Langs is returning to this most familiar of Shakespeare works to open ACT’s 2019 season in a mounting that “is my favorite of anything I’ve done here.” He wanted to investigate “what it means if an older generation can’t really hear its children, when we’re going to deliver to them a society that’s so deeply flawed. What is that about?”

He was especially moved and inspired by the “hopefulness and commitment” of the hundreds of thousands of young people who joined in the national March for Our Lives a year ago, to protest gun violence after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Another nudge: finding his Romeo in Castille, a versatile Broadway alum in his mid-20s. As Langs was directing Castille in the contemporary play “Tribes” at ACT in 2017, “I kept seeing in my mind Josh doing the balcony scene. I thought, there’s a Romeo!” (Langs was sold on Seattle native O’Fallon, his Juliet, by her third audition.)

So is there any special significance to doing a bilingual “R + J”? (As Juliet rhapsodizes, “That which we call a rose/ By any other word would smell as sweet.”)

With typical gusto, Langs gives his philosophical rationale: “If love is a radical act in a land of hatred, then it’s amazing that these two people with such different backgrounds could even find each other. And their intensity of affection, their immediacy and attraction, cuts through the language barrier.”

Langs tried out his thesis in a closed workshop staging “and something remarkable happened in the room. With wonderful actors speaking the poetry and a visual language expressing the poetry, it kind of blew my mind. I could actually see the writer’s images in space and time. I understood the play in a way I never had before, because it’s been made into a visual poem.”

Langs and company are endeavoring to serve both deaf and hearing patrons with several strategies: “We’ve taken on four or five different tactics, and the plan is constantly changing.”

Castille’s Romeo signs his lines as they are spoken by other actors, individually and chorally. Four designated performances will be fully signed by ASL interpreters, for deaf patrons seated in a specific section of ACT’s in-the-round Allen Theatre. And, Langs points out, “We also have tablets available for anyone who wants to read the play as it goes along,” in a closed-caption system that can be set up at your seat by request.

Shakespeare’s text, adapted by signing coach and deaf Seattle writer Ellie Savidge, has gone through a several-step translation process. “Translation one is just deciphering what Shakespeare is saying,” explained Langs. “Then it’s translated into ASL. And then that is turned into ASL poetry.” A distinct, dramatic form of sign-language storytelling, ASL in poetry mode uses gestures and facial expressions to evoke such poetic conventions as repetition, rhyme, alliteration, rhythm and meter.

Sorting out the lines of communication between Romeo and Juliet, their Capulet and Montague clans and others, has required considerably more preparation, acknowledges Langs, than the usual ACT production. But it’s an investment of time and creativity he values.

“We’re at our best as a theater company when we’re partnering authentically with another culture,” Langs said. “We’re all getting stretched by this. It’s a really wonderful way to learn about each other and grow.”

(Video by Cameron Johnson Video LLC)

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“Romeo + Juliet,” by William Shakespeare. March 1-31; ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., Seattle; $20-$85; 206-292-7676, acttheatre.org