This review starts with a disclaimer about the format and the context: Let’s Get Visual is the brainchild of MC Riley Harter who has come to Wellington for the New Zealand Improv Festival, brought her show format to a team of improvisers who assembled during the week of the festival and who are playing together for the first time. They are Andrea Ferpo, Emilia Higgs, Gitta Majumder, Jarrod Cook, Rider Miranda and Michele D’ath–Woodd.

The format aims to break new ground as a fully improvised show presented using New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) as the primary language. It’s a complex technical challenge that contextualises much of the critique that follows.

Harter has recruited a Deaf Consultant and a professional NZSL interpreter while preparing the show format. This pays off excellently on both counts. In her role as MC, Harter takes care to allow extra time so that NZSL signers can respond to audience prompts, she asks the lighting technician to delay certain cues and generally does a good job of championing accessibility for the Deaf and hard of hearing people who are watching along.

Harter trades her MC duties back and forth with the interpreter, Kelly Hodgins (from Platform Interpreting). Sometimes Harter signs while the interpreter translates into spoken English, which helps to showcase the presenters’ different signing styles and establishes the interpreter (to the hearing participants) as an equal and vital participant and conduit between audience and performers. Hodgins is brilliant, expressive and often upstages Harter in small gestural ways that add charm and zing to their onstage camaraderie. The pair are tons of fun to watch.

It’s striking how much participation there is between the audience, actors and MC/Interpreter, even by the standards of an improv show. The merry interplay is the source of Let’s Get Visual‘s charm. The improvisers’ games are designed to mostly focus on – aptly – visual and scene-painting elements. Characters are sometimes silent or enact tableaux vivants, games are for the most part kept short and relatively simple. The reason for this becomes clear as the show carries on and Harter attempts to engineer more complex scenes.

Clear lines of sight, committed body language and thoughtful physical positioning are vital to ensuring that everyone comprehends everyone else in any improv show, and this goes double for a show that tries not to rely on sound cues. The moment that more than two improvisors are asked to play together onstage, the risk increases. Errors of timing, interpreters running around to try and capture sight-lines, jumbled body language and confused embodiment of characters by performers who are still learning to read each other’s physical cues rather than using their words … Immersion begins to teeter like a tower of blocks, becoming shakier the more elements are stacked on. It sounds odd to suggest a dress rehearsal for improvised theatre, but running the more convoluted games in front of a live audience beforehand to test out the timing would have lessened the need for Harter to intervene with emergency side-coaching.

Watching the Harter and Hodgins riffing on the antics of the actors is the absolute highlight of the programme, and the audience responds incredibly warmly to that aspect of the show. Sign language interpretation and delivery is a highly physical, emotionally expressive performance, one that is more captivating to an audience full of improv veterans than the games themselves. More breathing room for MC and audience interactions, more time to set ground rules and teach fun new signs to the audience, fewer and less rushed games, would all elevate the format from ‘interesting experiment’ to ‘brilliant theatre in its own right’.

There’s something wonderful waiting to emerge from this format. NZSL-first improv is definitely a workable concept, and there is enough potential material in the canon of improv games to easily build an hour-long show that suits a non-hearing audience. Hopefully Harter will keep refining and testing this brand-new format, perhaps teaming up with a stable of NZSL experts who are also performers – those definitely exist in Wellington! – and potentially even finding a core group of two or three actors who could introduce a rotating guest list of other improvisors to the particular requirements of playing to a Deaf audience.

It would be fantastic to revisit this idea in a few months’ time, perhaps at a Fringe Festival, and see how far it progresses.

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