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My name is Dale Dymkoski
And I’m playing the role of Billy in TRIBES
Billy is a deaf young man who was born
And raised in a family of fully hearing people
Who for their own reasons
Chose to bring Billy up as hearing
And not teach him sign language
Or send him to a deaf school
Which was not unlike my upbringing
I was born with a hearing loss
I was diagnosed at the age of three
So we don’t know if I was born with it
Or if it came on from an early illness
But I was diagnosed with what’s called
A moderately severe
Sensorinueral Bilateral hearing loss
Which basically means I have about a
60 percent loss of hearing in both ears
It was very important
My parents wanted me to be quote unquote normal
Made sure I sat in front of the class at school
I played sports
It’s interesting
There’s a new commercial out right now
Because the Seattle Seahawks
Are in the Super Bowl
And there’s a deaf player on the Seahawks
It’s a Duracell battery commercial
Because Duracell makes hearing aid batteries
And it shows this guy as a young
Peewee football player
Getting ready in the locker room
And taping his hearing aids
To his ears with athletic tape
And I was like
That’s exactly what I used to do
So I did things like play football
And I played sports
And I played baseball
And that wasn’t really a sport where it
Mattered too much
That I wore hearing aids cause
I wore a batting helmet
But yeah, It was very important to my parents
That I was fully integrated
Into the rest of the world
But how I relate to Billy is that
I didn’t quite fit in
There was always something
Different about me
In the old days
With the way hearing aids were
Where it would amplify all of the sound
I could be in a room full of people
Having a conversation
And not totally be part of that conversation
So I was always sort of a step removed
And it just affected the way
I perceived the world
And how I grew up
But I didn’t learn sign growing up
I wasn’t ever really a part of a Deaf community
It was more like my experience was more like
Let’s ignore that you have that
Make believe that you have that
You don’t have that obstacle
I’ll call it
And go out into the real world and do it anyway
I took sort of an unusual path
To where I am today
I was an athlete growing up
You know all-state football
Played baseball in college
But I always had
A little performance streak in me
I do think that comes from like I said
Being a little bit different with my hearing
I just related to the world a little bit differently
And I was very introspective
I would read a lot
Write a lot
And so the bug was always sort of in me
But I didn’t fully realize it
Until after college
I applied to law school
I went to New York
And worked in a law firm for a little bit
And then it dawned on me
That I didn’t really want to become a lawyer
As much as I wanted to be on L.A. Law
It has been quite a challenge
You know it’s funny
Because when I first auditioned for this part
I worked with my acting coach in L.A.
And we put it on tape
And I came home and I was like
I think I’m the worst actor ever
Like there’s no chance that I’m ever
Going to get this part
So it’s just pretty fascinating
How it’s just kind of
An aside my perception about
How I felt about it
And where I am today
But in terms of process, yeah
I didn’t grow up learning sign
So this has been
As I said we call it acting bootcamp
Literally I wake up in the morning
Because not only am I learning the lines
There’s a speech impediment
There’s dialect
It’s British dialect
And then there’s sign language
And you know
The sign language actually comes fairly naturally
I think to actors
And I think that there’s
A Degree of performance that is in sign language
Because so much of it has to do with expression
And just communicating your feelings
So the signs, most of them make perfect sense
Most of them relate
You know you can make
There’s a visual cue
That you have in your head
Of what a sign means
So it sticks pretty easily
It’s easier I think than learning
A spoken language in that way
On it’s face, yeah
It’s a play about a deaf main character
Two deaf main characters
But the theme is larger
I think that it could be about anything
It’s about difference
It’s about accepting differences
It’s about you know
Just finding one’s own voice
And that happens for all the characters
In the play to a certain extent
And it’s about I think
Accepting people’s choice to live
And be and communicate
How they wish to do it
And there’s no right or wrong
And no one can judge anybody’s
Way of doing it
We’re very sensitive I think in this production
Of how we portray the Deaf
How we talk about the Deaf Community
But every person’s experience
Is their own experience
No two people’s hearing loss
And speech development is the same
Every person’s experience is unique