Artist Who’s Caught Between Two Worlds

Terry Galloway will find herself on a curious double bill when the West Coast premiere of her performance art piece “Out All Night and Lost My Shoes” opens Sushi’s eighth annual Neofest this Thursday through Saturday. On the other half of the bill is Ishmael Houston-Jones and his work titled “The End of Everything and Other Dances.”

Houston-Jones speaks while dancing in the dark. Galloway is a deaf actress who depends on lip reading to understand the spoken word.

For her, Houston-Jones’ time on stage will amount to about an hour of looking into blank space.

Which is pretty much business as usual for Galloway, 40, who is used to being shut out of both the hearing and the non-hearing world, and jokes about living in what she calls “a limbo world.” That, in part, is the subject of her semi-autobiographical show, which was developed from her earlier work “Heart of a Dog,” which played off-Broadway in 1983.

Galloway, whose hearing loss began when she was 12 and led to profound deafness when she was in college, has never learned the sign language that would allow her to communicate with other deaf people. She depends on lip reading, which works pretty well--unless someone isn’t facing her or has a beard and mustache, or she needs to communicate over the phone.

In a phone conversation from Galloway’s home in Tallahassee, Fla., an interpreter, longtime friend Donna Nudd, repeated questions to her, but Galloway spoke for herself. Fluently, but not without getting in a few cracks about what it is like for her to talk into a phone.

“It’s like talking to God or E.T.,” she said, and laughed. “You could be talking into a void. I hope I don’t end up sounding like a blithering idiot.”

Galloway acknowledges that her humor and her art are ways in which she deals with her fears and frustrations. At one point in her life, she said, when she was living in New York, she went “crazy” for about a month. She spent the time in a psychiatric institution, where she created a piece called “Mr. Handchops” in which a hammer in one hand silences a puppet named Mr. Handchops in the other. “The schizophrenics loved it,” she recalled, “but the doctors put me under sedation.”

As with most of Galloway’s stories, she’s only half joking.

“I tried to talk to the doctors,” she said. “I told them art will make me sane and they kept saying, ‘Art who?’ ”

Galloway, who says she got out of the institution by “getting quiet,” traces the origins of that period to the traumas of her birth and childhood.

When her mother was pregnant with her, doctors gave her antibiotics that ultimately induced Galloway’s deafness and, later, hallucinations. She has compared the gradual onset of deafness to dying--”early in life it took away my happy confidence in the image of a world where things always work right.”

She was born in Austin, Tex., but was raised until age 12 in Berlin, where her father worked for American counterintelligence during the height of the Cold War.

“We lived in the American sector, and all my life I heard that the Russians were going to come over and kill us. We had suitcases under our bed, and bottled water, and my mother knew the quickest way to the airport. But my father said there was no getting out. If the Cold War suddenly got hot, as everyone expected it would, he told us we would be the first to know and the first to go.”

Performing, which started for Galloway in college--Shakespeare is her first great love-- provided an antidote to her fear and boredom. The latter was a natural consequence of having such limited communication with both the hearing and non-hearing worlds, she explained. Even now, she spends most of her time alone, reading and writing.