Not Sorry

We’ve partnered with Artes Mundi to present a new performance film with artist Stephanie Bailey-Scott.

Artes Mundi and Taking Flight Theatre present the online premiere of a new performance film Not Sorry. Featuring artist Stephanie Bailey-Scott, the film explores the artist’s experience of becoming Deaf at 15 and her ‘rebirth’ after discovering British Sign Language (BSL) and with it a new identity and culture. 

The film’s starting point was the work the soft afternoon air as you hold us all in a single death (to breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction), 2020, by Dominican Republic born artist Firelei Báez, included in the exhibition Artes Mundi 9.

Inspired by Báez’s layering of images of historical archival documents with vibrant painted motifs, Not Sorry challenges the notion of the audiogram (a graph used in pure-tone hearing tests to establish hearing loss). Through movement, costume and BSL, Bailey-Scott weaves together a performance which questions the dominant narratives of Deaf experience, looking specifically at the oppression of the language via the Medical Model of Deafness and the prioritisation of oral education over sign.

In 1880 an international conference of Deaf educators in Milan, Italy, including Alexander Graham Bell, declared oral education (the learning of speech and lip-reading) as superior to manual education (sign language). Following the conference, schools in Europe and the United States engaged only in speech therapy for Deaf students, resulting in a decline in Deaf professionals (artists, writers, lawyers) and the quality of life and education of Deaf students. 

The outcome of the Milan Conference was that it effectively ‘banned’ the use of Sign Language in public life. This led to the promotion of the Medical Model of Deafness. When using this model, Deafness is seen as an impairment to be cured.

Questioning this ideology, which stifles the enrichment of Deaf culture and community through the suppressing of sign language; Not Sorry, highlights the connection between language, communication and identity. The piece has been made with the experience of Deaf audiences as its priority.