Sibylla Archdale Kalid: How we brought Maria Goes to Space to the stage! (BSL)

Posted on January 29, 2025 by

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Maria’s grandma was a space engineer. She made an exploration Rover who made it all the way to Mars – but then lost connection with Earth! Years after Grandma gave up on ever hearing from Rover again, the Queen announces a competition to go to Mars and find signs of life. Whoever does so will win a gold medal. Maria signs up, makes it to the red planet, and bumps into Rover! Together, they traverse the dangerous landscapes of Mars, eventually making a discovery so exciting… that there isn’t the sign language for it yet! The audience help Maria invent a sign for her discovery, and to get back home. 

Maria Goes to Space is about connection and bringing people along with you in your ambitions. It’s therefore very fitting that the team bringing it to audiences in February 2025 have been working together on it for almost three years now and their skills and personalities are in the DNA of the piece.

The show started life on one of artsdepot’s artist’s residencies. We are a mixed deaf, Deaf and hearing team, and had never worked together before, so a big part of the focus of that first development stage was building our dynamic as a team. We also explored using visual vernacular and projection to tell the story – and accidentally alighting on live video, which is still a key part of the form of the show. (Meaning that the audience, too, can occasionally feature on stage!) 

Two more R&Ds followed. At each stage, we invited children – deaf, Deaf and hearing – to give their feedback on what we’d made. ‘Feedback’ was mostly recorded by noting when the children laughed, or when they started fidgeting distractedly!

We also showed them a couple of different versions of scenes, asking them to shout out which was their favourite. In this way, the very building blocks of the show have been approved by the audience we hopefully intend to inspire – and we’ve invited those schoolchildren back to see the show that they helped create. 

Our quest to find the most exciting form possible for this story took us via vibrating technology. For our second R&D we invested in two ‘Woojer’ belts, vibrating belts originally designed for gamers, which replicate sound as vibration. For the child audience who we invited to test this, the experience was like being on a rollercoaster! Sadly, the practical implications of this technology are just too much for a show of this scale, but we hope to capture some of the vibrating effects of this through the use of Subwoofer speakers. 

Finally, we’ve arrived at a form for the show that is dynamic, using projection mapping, live video feed, creative captioning and movement-based performance. Key throughout has been the principle that the show is equally accessible to both deaf, Deaf and hearing audiences. We hope that audiences leave the show moved and inspired to follow their own adventure! 

Tickets: www.mariagoestospace.com

London (18th Feb, 11am and 1pm): https://www.theatrepeckham.co.uk/show/maria-in-the-stars/
Birmingham (20th Feb, 11am and 1pm): https://macbirmingham.co.uk/events/maria-in-the-stars
Derby (22nd Feb, 1pm and 3pm): https://derbytheatre.co.uk/event/maria-in-the-stars/


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