With ‘Flying Words,’ Performance Duo Takes Wing

Peter Cook is deaf. Kenny Lerner is not. Together they make up “Flying Words Project” (at Friends and Artists Theatre in Hollywood through Sunday), a funny/serious performance art blend of fables, fantasies and mythical tracts. Cook tells stories with his face, his body and his hands. Lerner’s voice is the accompaniment, the sound track.

“It’s like watching a play and a movie at the same time,” Lerner said in an interview, signing his words for Cook’s benefit. “It has all the power of a live performance. But it’s also like a film, because American Sign Language has techniques similar to cinematic ones: We can do slow motion, panning shots. If we’re driving a car, I will voice that--and you’ll see the trees go by, the grass, a rock, a car going the other way. . . .”

Lerner, 32--who spends most of the performance sitting cross-legged at the foot of the stage, with his back to the audience and facing Cook--is content with his supporting status: “My goal is to stay out of (the action), help the hearing audience see what’s happening for themselves. We write together, the ideas (originate) together. But when we’re on stage, Peter is the focus. People are watching him, seeing things through him.”

The two met four years ago in Rochester, N.Y., where Lerner was teaching at the International Technical Institute of the Deaf. Cook was a student, performing for deaf audiences.

“I had a kind of underground group,” said Cook, 27, using Lerner as his translator. “Then I met a poet named Jim Cohen. He said, ‘What you’re doing is very nice--it seems like poetry.’ I said, ‘Poetry?’ I’d always thought that poetry was related to English. I didn’t realize it was playing with language.”

Together the two began creating their own theatrical technique.

“Before,” Cook said, “I was basically (a) mime. When I’d take something from another poet’s work, like Allen Ginsberg, I’d try to imagine what the words would look like as a picture--then I’d literally become a picture of those ideas. But as time went on, I started developing different concepts that would go together, become a story.”

Since the pair work without a director, they rely on videotape (and regular self-criticism) to monitor their work.

“Once we have the story and the technique down, we’ll work on the words,” Lerner said. “I’ll have a basic idea of what the words will be, and Peter will type up his own ideas. Then we put them together. Peter’s doing things in real time; there’s a rhythm to it. So I have to be rhythmic and fit into his time.”

Lerner acknowledges that having like sensibilities is useful: “We have to be integrated. Neither one of us is the leader. Also, for me to voice and match what Peter’s going to do--because he improvises a lot of the time--I have to know what he’s going to do before he does it. It’s good, though. It forces me to forget that I exist and just become whatever’s happening on stage. So if he deviates a little, I’m ready.”

Although much of their time is spent touring, home for both is still Rochester, which has a large deaf community and a growing interest in deaf poetry.

“Part of my job was to teach history, show what’s happening--and that means creating pictures,” Lerner said of his pre-theater work. “I use it in what we do now. We’re influenced by movies, plays, people we meet. I’m influenced more by music, and Peter’s influenced more by art.”

Politics is also a motivator. Cook uses the word mokita (“a truth everyone knows but no one speaks”) to describe their feelings.

“I’m not preaching,” he said about a piece on the murder of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. “What happened there is a fact.” Another story, “Charlie,” was inspired by a real-life incident: “I was reading about a dog trained for the tunnels in Vietnam. Everyone said, ‘What a cute, wonderful dog.’ But he was trained to be a killer.”

Ironically, although sign language has become the primary means of communication (and livelihood) for both men, each came to it relatively late in life. Cook, who lost his hearing at age 3 from spinal meningitis, learned to lip-read.

“English was my first language,” he said. “But sign language is a lot more natural for me than English. It’s so visual . Sometimes it’s easy to read people’s lips, sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes people move their lips only a little bit, others move them too much--or (cover their mouths), wipe their faces. You know, ‘bat’ and ‘pat’ look exactly the same.”

Lerner, who has a degree in history, graduated from college wanting to work with children. One day he was sitting in a bar next to a deaf man: “I wanted to communicate with him, and I couldn’t. About two weeks later, I met a speech pathologist in Boston, then--I don’t know--one morning I woke up and thought ‘Deaf (education). That’s how I can work with children.’ I was 25, and had to start all over. Then I met Peter, and it was back to ground zero again.”