One of the many things I've become involved with while here at RIT is
the Robert F. Panara theater located here on the RIT campus at the National
Technical Institute for the Deaf. It is the nicest theater I have ever had
the opportunity to work at. You can find a photo below:
I recently became co-webmaster for the departments webpage and have
updated it to include this years performance season. I highly encourage
you to come see the shows, they are very well done, at a near professional
level in every aspect.
A common misconception people make about the theater is "if you
don't know American Sign Language you can't go to the shows." The theater
employs various communcation methods in every show or presentation it puts
on in order to entertain everyone. Theatrical productions are usually performed
in American Sign Language and then voiced over by voice actors (1 per character
on stage), so when you watch the show you don't notice the difference. Guest
speakers and other special presentations are always interpreted into voice
or sign language depending on what mode of communication the speaker is
using and are also usually live captioned on a screen behind the speaker.
One interesting Deaf speaker who visited last year was Vint Cerf who works
fairly high up (can't remember his title) at MCI Communications and is known
as the "father of the internet" because he invented the TCP/IP
protocol that is used for all internet communications.
This season should be really exciting so I encourage you to check out
the above website and to come see a show. If you have any questions you
can e-mail me or go to the webpage
above and e-mail the dept directly, either of us will be happy to answer
your questions.