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Paper short abstract

This paper examines a Deaf, blind, and Deaf blind theatre in Jaffa, where care is co created through intersensory collaborations. Everyday and artistic practices reveal how performers bridge profoundly different sensory worlds.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that care in the Deaf blind theatre examined here is not a stable or predefined practice but an ongoing collaboration. Based on long-term ethnography, the study analyzes how actors, directors, and practitioners negotiate the social, political, and affective labor required to make performance possible across conflicting modes of communication, including tactile sign language, glove language, audio description, and haptic cues.

The intersensory collaborations described here are embedded in architectural design as well as in everyday acts such as maintaining the fixed placement of coffee jars so blind users can independently navigate shared spaces. These practices generate what ensemble members describe as a transformed sensory consciousness. Blind actors learn tactile sign language, Deaf actors adapt movement for colleagues who cannot see, and directors revise dramaturgy when hands required for signing cannot simultaneously manipulate props.

By foregrounding the creative frictions and mutual adjustments that emerge in rehearsals, backstage labor, and live performance, the paper demonstrates how this case study rehearses a politics of care through difference. The theatre becomes a micro infrastructure of social repair that challenges normative sensory hierarchies and models alternative futures of coexistence within a conflict ridden and highly diverse urban context.