SEASON 38 | May 2026
Another Kind of Dialogue: A Symposium on Deaf and Hearing Collaboration in Theatre
May 23-24, 2026
Saturday 2:00PM - 5:30pm
Sunday 12:30 - 4:00pm
After-party Saturday 10pm-1am.
In conjunction with the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere of L M Feldman's Another Kind of Silence, The VORTEX is hosting Another Kind of Dialogue: A Symposium on Deaf and Hearing Collaboration in Theatre – a series of panel discussions that explores the challenges and rewards of deaf and hearing artists working together in theatre and presentations of new work by deaf and hard of hearing artists.
Featured conversations with artists include a panel on the process of creating Another Kind of Silence including playwright L M Feldman, our director, MoMo Holt, who has been directly involved in the development of the play over several years; Kim Weild, the director of City Theatre’s (Pittsburgh) production of Another Kind of Silence and City Theatre Artistic Director Clare Drobot. These artists will share their perspectives on creating a play with a unique and powerful approach to multilingual theatre for deaf and hearing audiences, giving context to our audiences experiencing the play on its opening weekend. We will also feature a larger discussion of deaf and hearing collaboration with Brian Cheslik, Artistic Director of Deaf Austin Theatre, Lisa Scheps, Artistic Director of Ground Floor Theatre, and Michael Baron, Artistic Director of Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma. https://deafaustintheatre.org
Our symposium also features TL Fosberg’s Between Two Worlds, a solo show about Fosberg’s experience as a hard of hearing artist, and a reading of Philoctetes, a new Deaf Culture adaptation in spoken English and American Sign Language by playwright Garrett Zuercher, directed by Kerry Cooler. We hope this symposium will serve to inspire other theatre makers to seek out partners and work together to expand our ideas about what makes innovative and accessible theatre.
Symposium Schedule
Saturday:
2:00-3:30pm: Deaf and Hearing Collaboration
Moderated by Rudy Ramirez
3:30-4:00pm: Break
4:00-5:30pm: TL Forsberg’s Between Two Worlds
8:00pm: Another Kind of Silence Performance
10:00pm-1:00am: After party
Sunday:
12:30-1:30pm: Another Kind of Silence Panel
Moderated by Rudy Ramirez
1:30-2:00pm: Break
2:00-4:00pm: Reading of Philoctetes by Garrett Zuercher
6:00pm: Another Kind of Silence Performance
Cost: FREE event! Donations welcome. ASL interpreted for all panels and performances. PT interpreters available upon advance request - Email vortex@vortexrep.org
TL Forsberg is an internationally touring speaker, artist, and American Ambassador on Disability working at the intersection of Deaf and Disability culture. A hard-of-hearing singer and advocate, she challenges binary thinking while expanding space for complex, marginalized identities. Featured in See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary, she is known for her role as Olivia on ABC Disneys, Switched at Birth and VH1’s SuperGroup. She has toured globally to over 40 festivals and opened for Alanis Morissette. Her solo show, The Book That Won’t Close: Confessions of a Love Addict, has earned Best of Fest, Top of Fringe honors, the Producer’s Encore Award, and a Rainbow Award for advancing bold, multicultural theatre. Her latest work, Between Two Worlds: Chronicles of the Not Deaf Enough Girl, merges performance and keynote to confront marginalization and expand inclusion across Deaf identities. She co-produces the Zero to Fierce Women’s Festival and serves on the Hollywood Fringe Festival advisory board. TL lives in Los Angeles with her partner Donavon and their cat, Victor-Victoria Go-Go Boots.
Kim Weild is an award-winning theater director, educator, and researcher working across classics, new plays, and devised performance, with a focus on access and disability aesthetics in performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is co-creator and Artistic Lead of The Apothetae Residency at The Public Theater in New York. She is also the founding Artistic Director of Our Voices, a collective of d/Deaf, disabled, HOH, hearing, and non-disabled artists creating innovative bilingual and interdisciplinary performance. Kim serves as Chair of the John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University. Through Our Voices and related collaborations, Weild has created groundbreaking performance work centering d/Deaf and disabled artists, including multiple commissions from The High Line. Among them is How the I Becomes the We, which culminated in a book of the same name. Her multiple collaborations with playwright Charles Mee includes soot and spit, a New York Times Critics’ Pick about deaf outsider artist James Castle, and ongoing work on an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths. For New York Live Arts, she directed Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska, which offered a world premiere ASL translation, incorporating original film work by Bill Morrison and a score by Philip Glass. A Drama Desk Awards nominee, Weild developed and directed Keith Hamilton Cobb’s acclaimed American Moor, recipient of multiple Elliot Norton Awards and two AUDELCO Awards, now in the permanent collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library and filmed for Lincoln Center. She directed the NNPN world premiere of L M Feldman’s Another Kind of Silence at City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh. Her work has been seen internationally at Shakespeare's Globe, Carnegie Hall, New York Theatre Workshop, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Teatro alla Scala, and beyond. Her production of Uncle Vanya was selected for the Prague Quadrennial, and she co-wrote the musical Dusty, about Dusty Springfield, which ran in London’s West End. Additional honors include multiple New York Innovative Theater Awards, two IRNE Awards, an NEA grant, and finalist recognition for the Alan Schneider Director Award.Member, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
Clare Drobot is the Artistic Director at City Theatre Company and has been a member of the company's artistic leadership since the fall of 2021. She joined the staff at the theater in 2015 serving as the Director of New Play Development and later as Associate Artistic Director, and then Co-Artistic Director. A dramaturg, playwright, and producer Clare has worked in various capacities at Premiere Stages at Kean University, Laura Stanczyk Casting, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The McCarter Theatre, The BE Company, Play Penn, and New Dramatists. Her credits as a playwright include work showcased in Ars Nova’s ANT FEST and through the New Hazlett Theatre’s CSA Series among others. She has dramaturged and developed work with Stephen Belber, Liza Birkenmeier and Jill Sobule, Chisa Hutchinson, Matt Schatz, Anna Ziegler and many more writers and directors. She serves on the boards of the National New Play Network and Brew House Arts and is a member of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh’s Generations Speakers program. She was a member of the inaugural Global Fellows Cohort through the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and is a graduate of Leadership Pittsburgh (LP XXXVIII). BA/BFA Carnegie Mellon University, member of LMDA.
Michael Baron is the producing artistic director of Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma and has directed over 120 productions at theaters across the country. Most recently, he co-directed the ASL/Spoken English musical productions of Cinderella with Dr. Brian Cheslik (Lyric/ZACH/Deaf Austin Theatre) and The Music Man with Sandra Mae Frank (Olney Theatre) and directed Fun Home starring Sandra Mae Frank(Lyric), and Fiddler on the Roof starring Chris Tester and Sandra Mae Frank (Lyric). Other directing credits include The Prom, Carousel, Titanic, Head Over Heels, Bright Star, Dreamgirls, Assassins, Oklahoma!, Les Miserables, Spring Awakening, Ragtime, the new works King of Pangaea and Concerto, and the current production of A Christmas Carol at Ford’s Theatre. He is a two-time Helen Hayes Award winner with an MFA in directing from Trinity Repertory and a BA in theater from Wake Forest University.
L M Feldman is a queer, feminist, GNC playwright who writes theatrically audacious, physically kinetic, ensemble-driven plays that are both epic & intimate. Plays about the women & queers in the margins. Plays that shift the prism. Plays that quest & grapple. Plays that explode space & time & dramaturgical form. Plays that seek to create a communally transcendent experience – for those both onstage & off. Recent plays include: S P A C E (Central Square Theater); HAND FOOT HAND (Playwrights Realm); LIMBER, A LOVE STORY (Emerson Stage); THRIVE, OR WHAT YOU WILL [AN EPIC] (American Shakespeare Center); SCRIBE, OR THE SISTERS MILTON, OR ELEGY FOR THE UNWRITTEN (Playwrights’ Center); and ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE (City Theater Company); among others. L is ongoingly thankful to have been a Venturous Playwright Fellow & a Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, a finalist for the FEWW Prize & the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Drama, and a nominee for the Herb Alpert Award, Wendy Wasserstein Prize, Barrie & Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award, & Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A movement artist by trade, L spent a decade performing duo trapeze at festivals around the world, and they continue to teach both playwriting & circus dramaturgy around the country. L is passionate about theater that MOVES, and circus that DELVES. L has lived in seven cities and is based in Philadelphia, where they write, collaborate, advocate, teach, and handstand.
MoMo Holt is an acclaimed actor, director, playwright, Certified Deaf Interpreter (CDI), and Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL), whose work centers Deaf-led, bilingual theatre with “access-built-in” every stage of the artistic process. She is a professor in the Performing Arts Program at Gallaudet University, where her teaching and scholarship advance inclusive performance practices, Universal Design in Theatrical Presentation, VGC-centered (Visual Gestural Communication) storytelling, and translation for performance. MoMo has been deeply involved in the development and life of Another Kind of Silence, originating the role of ANA and performing in all three major workshops: The Drama League’s New Directors/New Works program in New York City (2013), PlayPenn in Philadelphia (2016), and the Colorado New Play Summit in Denver (2020). She later served for a full year as DASL for the production at City Theatre (Pittsburgh), where she led all ASL translation; provided Deaf-centered dramaturgy; guided the production’s engagement with Deaf and hard-of-hearing cultures; and coached both Deaf and hearing actors in ASL performance, bilingual storytelling, access aesthetics, and culturally responsive collaboration. In this same production, she also performed as Peter’s Chorus. She holds a BFA in Acting from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Theatre from Towson University, and is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
Dr. Brian Andrew Cheslik- has been involved in theatre for the past 25+ years and has performed every function in the theatrical hierarchy. Brian is the artistic director of Deaf Austin Theatre. In addition to theatre, Dr. Cheslik is an assistant professor at the UTRGV, where he is the program coordinator for the ASLI Program and the GURC Midwest Director for the Clerc Center. He holds a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Gallaudet University, a master’s and doctorate in Deaf studies & Deaf education from Lamar University, and is a member of the Stage Directors & Choreographers (SDC) society. He is a Certified Deaf Interpreter, works as a Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL), and has a book being published about Deaf theatre to be released in 2026. He has won numerous B. Iden Payne Awards, was a finalist for the 2025 Fischandler Award, and has been nominated for several Helen Hayes Awards for the 2025 production of A Strange Loop, in which he co-produced. Acting: The Laramie Project (Various Roles) Deaf Austin Theatre, Tribes (Billy) Le Petit Theatre, Shakespeare’s R & J (Student #2) Act Out Productions, Zombie Prom (Miss Strict) TILT Performance Group, Corpus Christi (James), Act Out Productions, Drop Dead (Chas Looney) Emerald City Players, Lost in Yonkers (Jay) Emerald City Players. (and many more) Directing: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella- Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma & ZACH Theatre (both in collaboration with Deaf Austin Theatre, Tiny Beautiful Things- Deaf Austin Theatre, Chronicles of a Black Deaf Blind Girl- Deaf Austin Theatre, Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses- UTRGV Theatre, The Last Five Years- Ground Floor Theatre in Collaboration with Deaf Austin Theatre, Picasso at the Lapin Agile- UTRGV Theatre, Next To Normal- Ground Floor Theatre in Collaboration with Deaf Austin Theatre. (and many more) IG: @brianandrewcheslik, TT: @Deaftattedcollegeprof, www.drbriancheslik.com