Dead Centre: Deaf Republic

Dead Centre: Deaf Republic is a piece of theater playing Off Broadway at NYU Skirball in New York City. Dublin's company Dead Centre built it from Ilya Kaminsky's acclaimed poetic narrative, after a premiere at London's Royal Court. A soldier shoots a deaf boy in a public square, and in answer the whole town goes deaf, refusing to hear the soldiers and teaching one another a sign language of resistance. Deaf actors lead a production folding sign language, puppetry, live cinema, and music into a single charged form, in which silence becomes both a hiding place and an act of defiance.