Day: March 27, 2018

elodieunderglass:

tam–lin:

elodieunderglass:

the-real-eye-to-see:

Holly Maniatty, a certified sign language interpreter upstaged hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg with her enthusiasm during his concert at the Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Maniatty has worked numerous festivals and concerts with well-known rappers including Beastie Boys, Wu-Tang Clan and Killer Mike and this isn’t the first time that she has stolen the show with her major skills.

This looks like some special type of sign language that assists people with understanding the beats and innuendo along with lyrics.

Snoop Dogg made the right choice!

I thought this was so cool and exciting that I went and learned more about the interpreter here: http://www.thestory.org/transcript-interview-holly-maniatty-interpreter-wu-tang-clan it’s really cool how she spends so much time studying the music so that she can express the performer’s personality and intent. She also tries to make jokes/innuendo work, which is why she’s using a lot of extra expressions, and she is using her body to express important parts of the beat. There’s a bit where she “invites (signed) applause” that works really well with the music. Idk, I don’t know enough about signing to really comment on this, but it strikes me that she’s getting a lot of information into her performance.

One bizarre thing I noticed was how all the outlets reporting on Maniatty’s gone-viral performance was the language they used to describe it. They say she “upstaged” Snoop Dogg, that she “out G’ed him” or “stole the show,” and I think they all profoundly missed the point, even if the word choices were subconscious. Look at the OP for this post, it says she “upstaged” him and regularly “steals” the attention. It’s not like she’s a random dancer or attention seeker: she’s hired by the performers to make their performance accessible! This is her job, and she was specifically chosen and invited by the performer to be there. She isn’t stealing the show, she is charged with making it accessible to a Deaf and HoH audience.

And instead of a literal translation of the lyrics (which often doesn’t really work with hip-hop, because a lot of the cleverness/entertainment is in secondary meanings and rhythm) she’s trying to express the intention. I bet the performers who choose her are super glad they did, since she studies them so carefully, and tries to put their stage personalities across in sign! So many more of their fans are getting their money’s worth! She’s not doing it for parody, she’s doing it to serve the audience. If she was a threat to the performance, if the value she’s adding is distracting or “upstaging,” then PEOPLE WOULD USE A LYRIC MARQUEE INSTEAD. Basically live closed-captioning for events. But they don’t, because the whole-body human interpretation is what actually transmits the meaning, and artists want the audience to appreciate then meaning.

So it’s very weird to see so much language in these articles/posts crowing about how this (brilliant, master-of-her-craft) white woman “stole” the show and “did better at it” than Snoop Dogg. A lot of weird intersectional stuff to think about there.

(I’m totally overthinking this, the video is SUCH good fun though! It makes ONE WHOLE exciting performance!!! and we are so lucky to live in a world where there are people who care about making music accessible!

Here’s another Russian prop post I rebloggged. (OP, not the commentary.)

I remember that I added this commentary out of boiling annoyance, but tried to do so in a productive way. I think it’s actually quite interesting in light of the OP being an alleged Russian propagandist, and it being a pretty good example of steering a conversation.

 See how the criticism is bracketed with a friendly start that recognizes the good points of the post, and ends with a self-deprecating and positive ending for people to reblog from? That’s my favorite way to offer critique, because it raises the level of the conversation, keeps the OP in good faith, but still points out the flaws; the OP can’t really say that you’re being nasty and hateful and singling them out personally, if you sympathetically agree that they’ve done the best job that they could. 

And it deliberately changes the direction: from the negative narrative of one performer “upstaging” another, to the positive “two performers creating a unified performance.” So the OP can’t really argue: they’ve been wrapped up and redirected, and they either have to ignore me or agree with me. 

Obviously, I can’t claim that this was a long-term political plot, I just did this because those two words (”upstage”/”stole”) in the OP annoyed me viscerally, and I am very pedantic and mischievous. 

I have decided not to delete this, even though it’s from an alleged Russian propagandist deliberately destroying the mechanism of democracy by encouraging Leftist Millennial Nihilism ™, because I think this is actually an interesting example of how critical engagement and discussion can change the conversation a little bit.