ABSTRACT
My friendship with Ursula Bellugi began in 1969, a couple of years after the National
Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) was established. I was deeply involved in exploring a new
way of illuminating the language of signs for theater use. For lack of a better word to
describe it, I coined “Sign-Mime.” Some of my writings on this subject were included in
the grant application, submitted to the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare, to found the NTD. I think it was about the same time that Dr. Bellugi was in the
process of establishing her research laboratory at The Salk Institute. Her aim was to
analyze the sign language from a linguistic point of view, whereas mine was to bring it to
stage as an art form. She gave the language a new name-American Sign Language
(ASL). The difference between Sign-Mime and ASL lies in the fact that the former
focuses on adapting English dialogue and poetry into sign whereas the latter represents
the communicative mode of the Deaf community.
