← Myles de Bastion
North West Deaf Arts Festival poster, for Deaf people and hearing allies

09, Portland, Oregon

NW Deaf Arts Festival

Event
NW Deaf Arts Festival
Location
Portland, Oregon
Date
June 16th 2018
Role
Founder, Artistic & Technical Director

I founded the festival in 2018: a day of Deaf music, dance, poetry and multimedia performance in Portland, Oregon.

Northwest Deaf Arts Festival

I directed the NW Deaf Arts Festival artistically and technically. It brought Deaf musicians, dancers, poets and artists from across the country to Portland, and Deaf and hearing audiences watched the same performances together.

I made the promotional video. It has had 20,000 views on Facebook and YouTube.

Sound visualizations, interactive lighting, open captions, tactile vibration. The music arrives as light and as something you can feel, for everyone in the room at once.

According to the US Census, more than 180,000 Oregonians have difficulty hearing, and many of them meet isolation and stigma because of it. I started the festival to answer that with role models on a stage, and with Deaf culture in public view: its social beliefs, behaviors, literary traditions, values and artistic talent.

The Deaf hip-hop artist Sean Forbes, from Detroit, headlined. He pairs his lyrics with American Sign Language, and he has made a run of music videos with the Oscar-winning Deaf actress Marlee Matlin and the Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Also on the bill were Antoine Hunter of the Urban Jazz Dance Company, the Deaf poet Raymond Luczak, and a roster of local performers. I played too, as a multimedia performer.

Our technical team works year round on the lighting and tactile hardware the festival runs on, and I am proud of them. We build for access first, and we release the software and hardware free and open source so that anyone else can build it too.

Northwest Deaf Arts Festival website: http://www.nwdeafartsfest.com/
CymaSpace website: http://www.cymaspace.org

Press

Oregon Public Broadcasting, Think Out Loud: Deaf Musician Myles de Bastion Founds Northwest Deaf Arts Festival

Two festival performers posing in front of a red CymaSpace logo painted on a wall, one wearing a T-shirt reading I am deafinitely dope
A dancer in a top hat and long skirt with both arms raised on stage beneath the North West Deaf Arts Festival screen
The same dancer with arms outstretched on stage as the audience watches from the floor and the balcony above
Two dancers of the Urban Jazz Dance Company performing in front of a screen bearing the company name
A dancer leaping mid-air above the stage under pink and purple light
A performer on the edge of the stage leading a red-lit room of audience members with their hands in the air
Two dancers performing together on stage beside a fan of colored light tubes
A guitarist performing in front of a green open-caption screen reading They built another machine
A guitarist in a helmet performing beneath open captions reading People all over the world came to learn
A performer at a table of electronics in a red-lit room below a large open-caption screen
A performer in a wide-brimmed hat signing with both hands raised under stage light
A poet performing in American Sign Language on stage below his projected words
Raymond Luczak performing on stage in front of a screen showing his name and the festival logo
A performer addressing a full house, with the audience on the floor and along the balcony rail
A hip-hop artist in sunglasses performing on stage with both hands raised
A hip-hop artist at the microphone in front of open captions reading From where I come
A DJ in a cap and sunglasses working a controller in front of an LED wall
A performer signing on stage below an open-caption screen reading There lies
A performer at the microphone with the audience filling the floor and the balcony above
North West Deaf Arts Festival banner reading An Inclusive and Innovative Experience for Deaf and Hearing Allies
North West Deaf Arts Festival logo
Next project CymaSpace