As part of a two-day conference, The Body’s Role in Thinking, Performing and Referencing, this session led by Peter Cook will feature sign-language and spoken-language artists performing short works, followed by a panel discussion. This event will include six professional storytellers who make use of gesture extensively in their work. Dack Virnig, Missy Keast, and Manny Hernandez will each perform a story in ASL, and Leeny Del Seamond, Donna Washington, and Robbie Telfer will each perform a story in English. After the performance, internationally known Deaf performing artist Peter Cook, Chair of the American Sign Language Department at Columbia College Chicago, will lead a panel discussion with the artists about how gesture enhances the work of storytellers whether their works use spoken or signed language.  Peter Cook has recently been awarded the 2017 Storytelling Hall of Fame Award from the Department of Communication and Performance at East Tennessee State University. As a research associate on the Neubauer Collegium project “The Body’s Role in Thinking, Performing, and Referencing,” Cook co-organized a panel discussion called “Roots, Diversity, Imagery: The Driving Force Behind Sign Language Identity” in February 2016. He has contributed numerous scholarly contributions in the literary analysis of ASL stories and poems, which have become important in comparing gesture as it is used in hearing and deaf storytellers.

This event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Global Voices Performing Arts & Lecture Series, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, and the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language.