Breaking Barriers at Boston Symphony

Howard-Karp, a senior at Newton North High School, has been involved with the Boston-based DEAFinitely Performance Crew hip-hop dance group for around four years. Presently, she’s both a lead dancer and a mentor to younger students in the group, which includes youths between ages 8 and 18. The group performs in public around a dozen times a year, sometimes more; on Wednesday, September 18, Howard-Karp and the rest of the performance crew will be dancing at Symphony Hall before the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s free Concert for the City.

Though performance is an important aspect of what DEAFinitely does, it’s also a means of connection on several fronts, said founder Jamie Robinson, a dancer with a masters’ degree in Deaf studies, and longtime coach John Ying, 39, a Deaf breakdancer with a day job as a software engineer.

Over 80 percent of DEAFinitely’s staff and 90 percent of the participating youth either identify as Deaf, hard of hearing, DeafBlind, or DeafDisabled. (The capital letters denote identification with those cultural and language communities, rather than the physical conditions of being deaf.) Many come from homes that primarily speak Spanish or Portuguese. There are a few hearing children in the group, who tend to be CODAs, children of Deaf adults, and the language of the rehearsal room is ASL.

Participating in the dance crew connects Deaf youth with their peers socially. It also connects them with Deaf adults who can mentor them in ways that hearing adults might not be able to. And it crucially gives them another point of connection with their own families, many of whom cannot communicate in sign language.

DEAFinitely is anchored at Boston Public Schools’s Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, where the population includes students from all over Boston and the surrounding towns. “Often, students go home and their homes are not near the school, so social opportunities are quite special,” said Morrison, 44, a DeafBlind accessibility consultant who prefers to only use one name. “DEAFinitely brings people together. It’s an important need.” DEAFinitely also runs mentoring programs for older Deaf and DeafBlind teenagers and young adults who may not be interested in performance, but want to stay connected with others who share their experience.

It’s a far cry from Ying’s own childhood experience, where he was taught to communicate orally with the help of hearing aids and struggled to connect with his classmates. “I feel like I missed so much,” he said, describing how he felt that “things would happen all around me” in which he was rarely able to participate.

His life changed in middle school, when he saw “a bunch of kids standing around in a circle” around classmates who were performing fancy and flashy breakdance moves. “I wanted to learn that. So I jumped right in. I felt like people could see me when I was dancing…it was an opportunity to be seen, and I wasn’t just a quiet, shy person in the background.”

At that point, his ability to communicate with others was still very special; he would not learn ASL until age 22, after he had graduated college. Because of this, learning breakdancing was “a lot of trial and error” for him. “I depended on the Internet a lot. I watched films by myself and looked at different styles.” He would have loved to have had a coach or a mentor, he said, so he’s thrilled to be that coach for the next generation, and “provide access to things that I didn’t have as a kid.”

The way that the DEAFinitely dancers experience beat differs wildly. “Some can’t feel it or hear it at all, but there’s an internal rhythm. Others are like ‘turn it up! turn it up!’ so they can hear it better. It’s very diverse,” said Robinson.

Morrison compared the Deaf experience of beat to a hearing person listening to beat in a language they don’t understand. “As the kids practice a song [in American Sign Language], they start to understand the translation. We’re expressing the message through our language, American Sign Language, and it becomes an art form.”

Morrison is DeafBlind, grew up in a family of beat lovers, and particularly likes to know the lyrics to what they’re listening to. “I’m not going to be able to understand what I’m hearing, but I can read the lyrics and feel the rhythm and read along that way, and that helps me feel connected with the song.”

Ying described the “various ways” in which he connects with beat without listening to it in a way that a hearing person might. “I can see how people are moving. I can feel it. I might even take my hearing aids off so I’m not hearing any sound, but I can sort of visualize the beat in my head…I have lots of different access points. It’s not just focusing on the sound.”

Morrison is particularly passionate about expanding access for DeafBlind people, especially as DEAFinitely notices more DeafBlind students in its orbit at the Horace Mann School.

“We rely on touch-based communication. Before a show begins as a DeafBlind person, I’ll want to feel the stage, the set, the costumes. And as the show goes on, I’ll have an interpreter who can sign in my hand,” they explained. “There’s a huge gap in access for people who are DeafBlind, and we want to make sure that our DeafBlind youth have access to the DEAFinitely crew as well, so they’re getting the best of the best. We don’t want them isolated or alone.”

Since its first iteration in 2023, Concert for the City has given a platform to several community-based ensembles in addition to the BSO and Pops, but most of those ensembles are musicians as well, said BSO program manager Zoe Murphy.

“We really wanted to include a dance group…we’re trying to diversify the different art forms at Concert for the City, and because we’ve worked with DEAFinitely in the past, we want to continue,” she said. At the Sept. 18 Concert for the City, two ASL interpreters will be on hand throughout the show, and the DEAFinitely crew will be seated near the front; in 2023, they were invited to put their hands on the stage as the orchestra played to feel the vibrations. High above their heads at center stage, some of them might have noticed the name of one of history’s most revered deaf musicians – Beethoven.

“The point is that there is no one type of Deafness,” Robinson said. “We are always expanding and looking at the diversity of the kids, and we want other organizations to think about access and inclusion, and continue to grow that.”