In 1871, Lewis Carroll, the creator of the world renowned children’s story, Alice in Wonderland, published its’ not so popular sequel, Through the Looking-Glass as known as Alice Through the Looking-Glass. In this book Alice ventures into the “back-to-front world” of “Looking-glass world”, essentially she goes into a parallel universe. One of her encounters in this world leads her to finding what seems to be a book written in a unintelligible language, once she realizes that the world she’s in is a mirror world, she holds the book up to a mirror and the first poem she is able to read is titled, Jabberwocky. An absolutely nonsensical tale riddled with whimsical thrills and made up words for its time. Today, Jabberwocky is known as the greatest nonsense poem to ever be written in the English language . It has also had a huge impact on the deaf world as whole when it comes to deaf theater’s evolution.
If Bernard Bragg was hailed as the father of Visual Vernacular, it can be said that Eric Malzkuhn was the progenitor of Deaf theatre alongside him. Eric “Malz” Malzkuhn was best known for the many plays he wrote in his life as well as being the first to ever write a Deaf musical. Malzkuhn was also known as the first person to ever sign Jabberwocky professionally. “Jabberwocky was my trademark, I had been performing it since the 1940s and eventually in 1967 (nearly 30 years) I decided to give it to NTD (National Theatre of the Deaf)”. Even after a great amount of digging, the search for finding a young Eric Malzkuhn signing Jabberwocky is yet to be found. However, one of his final performances is still on the internet today thankfully.
Due to limited information, it’s almost impossible to tell just how much Malzkuhn’s performance has changed since before his last performance, but it is imagined that he must have greatly improved thanks to over fifty years of practice. In this performance you can see that Malzkuhn is fully giving his all in this ASL adaptation of the poem. His hands run wildly as he tells the story of the ferocious beast’s end. His facial expressions are locked into the tale and he conveys almost an urgency with his performance. Putting the audience there with him as he recants the tale of valory and celebration. He enjoyed himself and the audience shared the same thrill.
Once Malzkuhn was “retired” from performing Jabberwocky, he found himself a successor in Joe Velez. The two had worked together closely in NTD and Malzkuhn believed that Velez was the perfect man to take up the mantle of his trademarked performance. “The reason I picked Joe was because of his wonderful control over his body, his facial expressions were extraordinary, I truly felt that he did Jabberwocky better than,” Malzkuhn would later say in an interview long after Velez’s death.
Eric Malzkuhn's Interview/Joe Velez's Jabberwocky (Begins 3:11)
From the jump, you can tell that Velez’s performance was much different than Malzkuhn’s. Instead of standing or sitting in one place Velez’s body glides across the stage as he tells the tale that Malzkuhn has told for well over half a century. His signing is clear and cut to the tee. He wastes no extra movements as if he has practiced perfecting his performance longer than his predecessor. As old as the video is, it is clear that Velez shows a sharpness that is rarely seen today. There’s almost an inviting movement to the way he signs the story as if he wants the audience to join him in the telling of the tale, truly exhilarating.
Velez and Malzkuhn were huge fans of each other and although Velez had taken the reins of performing his version of Jabberwocky, Malzkukn had said that years after he had stopped, he had ended performing at the same town as Velez one night and apparently Jabberwocky was the performance he had chosen. So when it came time to perform it, Velez looked down in the audience and asked Malzkuhn directly if he was ready to see the performance. “Jabberwocky was ours, it wasn’t mine, it wasn’t his, it was ours,” Malzkukn would go on to say in an interview.
In 1972, NTID’s Drama Club took to the stage to perform three different thematic performances, Spoon River, The Jabberwocky, and Haiku Harvest the students did their thing and performed to the best of their abilities together. However, when Jabberwocky was performed it was done as almost its own separate thing. A male in a brown sweater got on stage and performed the piece in a very active way. It wasn’t the same kind of “active” that Velez had shown, instead this performance came off more as a dance, as if the actor was trying his best to be quick and short with his signing like the poem is when you read it. There’s a lot of hopping around as the tale is told, its a much different apdation to what Malzkuhn and Velez had done, but it's different which gives other adaptations a chance to emerge.
1972 NTID's Drama Club's Jabberwocky (Begins 21:11)
In the last twenty years, there have been hundreds of ASL iterations of Jabberwocky which have flooded the internet. Many of them have been done in a way that leaves the people signing in the video anonymous and unable to track, but in some cases like Crom Saunders, it is clear that they have an ASL take of the poem they’d like to share. Saunders’ video is done during a time when many deaf people would abuse the editing speed for videos profusely. In his case it kinda works, how he describes the monster and eventually the victory in a jittery fashion makes it seems like its being down in stop motion, which totally gives it more flair than a lot of videos that have Jabberwocky as their focus.
The final and most recent popular evolution of the Jabberwocky was done by Sunshine 2.0. This adaptation, right off the bat, is different solely because it’s being performed by two people rather than one. The two men begin as the form of the beast and end separate as cheering people. It’s also different because they chose to give their background a more “jungle-ly”-feel than any other iteration. They truly did what they could to think outside the box for a poem that is well over a hundred years old. Bravo to them and to all versions that were created thanks to this poem.
Jabberwocky is seen in deaf theatre countless times and when it is not being performed it can be found being taught in english classes around the world. The poem drives hard for a creative mindset giving a powerful launchpad for generations of Deaf performers everywhere. In an interview done with another Jabberwocky performer known by the name Andrew Morrill, he had stated that he believes that there was true fulfillment when he performed the tale. It may derive from the silliness a famous mind conjured out of boredom, but it has truly transformed and evolved how Deaf performers think about performing. Who knows what ASL Jabberwocky performances will look like a hundred years from now?
Citation:
Eric F. Malzkuhn: Sign wizard, teacher, and mentor. Deaf people.com. (n.d.). Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://www.deafpeople.com/history/history_info/malz.html
Malz-Velez. (2018). Deaf Sign Press. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://fb.watch/gmnO7aLa4o/.
