For our April Live Night, we’re thrilled to invite you to come with Witness to see Jodee Mundy’s Personal on April 26 at Arts House.
Personal, a blend of performance, storytelling, multimedia and animation that delves into the contradictions of living in a Deaf family in a society that views the family with voyeuristic curiosity, is courtesy of our Stage Partner Arts House in North Melbourne.
The idea of Live Nights is to see a show together, and then to chat afterwards over a drink in a informal but facilitated conversation: basically, Book Club for theatre. Our partners are offering discount tickets for Live Nights, and they are available exclusively to Individual and Patron supporters of Witness.
Created with a talented team of collaborators and presented in two languages via a virtual interpreter and creative captioning, Personal is a smart, touching and deeply personal work exploring dis/ability and how people perceive one another.
When she was five years old, Jodee Mundy got lost in Kmart. When no one from her family came to the front desk to meet her despite repeated loudspeaker announcements, she understood for the first time that her family was different from others. Personal is an intimate story of Mundy’s experiences as the only hearing person in a Deaf family, including her role as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) who is able to pave the way for a family as interpreter, authority and conduit.
“My story is not unique – there are millions of CODA worldwide. As CODAS, we intersect the Deaf and hearing worlds and hold knowledge of sign languages and the culture of Deaf people. We are a hidden minority in a minority community – the CODA perspective offers a unique take on disability,” said Mundy.
Mundy says that Auslan is her native language and English her second. “I’ve never seen ‘disability’,” she says. “I only know the love and protection of those closest to me.”
In 2012, Mundy formed an independent creative producing company, Jodee Mundy Collaborations, and in 2016 Arts House premiered Imagined Touch, a deafblind multisensory live art experience that won a Green Room award for Innovation in Experiential Performance.
See our full Live Night program for 2018. To join in, become a Witness supporter. For $10 a month ($15 if you want to give us some extra support)you also gain access to our longform essays and special features, community forums and the Witness Interview podcast.
Bookings are now open. Details on how to book your discount ticket are in the Live Nights Forum. Please note that that the venue is wheelchair accessible and that for this Live Night there will be Auslan interpreters available. If there are people who want this service for all Live Nights, please let us know. We don’t have the resources to provide them yet, but if there’s a demand, we will find some.
