Spencer Liff Talks Challenges and Surprising Advantages in SPRING AWAKENING Choreography

Choreographer Spencer Liff faces an interesting challenge with his latest Broadway endeavor, choreographing Deaf West's SPRING AWAKENING revival.

"People don't do musicals with deaf actors for a reason," Liff told the Hollywood Reporter. "We're taking advantage, certainly, rather than trying to hide what they've got going on. When you watch our show, it feels a bit like watching a foreign movie with subtitles - for the first few minutes, you're incredibly aware of the signing and trying to figure out how to watch. But ten minutes in, I think it washes over you, you stop thinking about the disabilities, and you just watch it."

Liff shared that the process took longer in some cases, but he held every actor to the same standard. "You'd usually say, 'Everybody, stand on the one count, move your foot on four.' That takes thirty seconds with only hearing actors, but it's an hour of explaining now," Liff says. "But I never treated [deaf actors] differently - they were expected to do it perfectly and there was never any coddling. I screamed at those kids if they did something wrong. That put everybody up to par, and they knew they couldn't say, 'I can't do that because I'm deaf.'"

In particular, Liff outlined ten elements unique to this production:

1. The choreographer never signed before
2. Translations aren't literal and exact
3. Not every gesture is sign language
4. Actors couldn't make excuses
5. Facial expressions were ready
6. Cues are constantly everywhere
7. Shouting and songs are "seen"
8. No disability is hidden
9. There are 25 Broadway debuts
10. The musical's message remains

Click here to read the original article on the matter.

Deaf West Theatre's acclaimed production of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's SPRING AWAKENING, directed by Michael Arden and choreographed by Spencer Liff, opened on Sunday night, September 27, at Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

SPRING AWAKENING, the Tony Award-winning Best Musical of 2007, will run 18 weeks only, through Saturday, January 9. It will be performed simultaneously in American Sign Language and spoken and sung in English by a cast of 28. Deaf West Theatre was last represented on Broadway with the triumphant production of Big River in 2003.

Based on Frank Wedekind's controversial 1891 expressionist play of the same name and featuring an electrifying pop/rock score, SPRING AWAKENING follows the lives of a group of adolescents as they navigate their journey from adolescence to adulthood in a fusion of morality, sexuality and rock & roll. An extraordinary creative team including Michael Arden and Spencer Liff has reinvented the groundbreaking musical about lost innocence and the struggles of youth in true Deaf West style.