Hello. My name is Valerie Sutton and welcome to my kitchen. I live in La Jolla, California and I'm 72 years old. Today is November 20 2023. I was born in 1951 in New York City and my family moved to California when I was a young girl. California had a profound influence on the invention of SignWriting. Of course at the time I had no idea. At age 9, I asked my mother if I could possibly become an actress and go to Hollywood. Whooo, everybody wants to do that when you're a little girl but instead my mother said “I could give you some professional ballet training. There's a wonderful studio in Laguna Beach, California, where you can train with some of the best people and you'll become a dancer.” So that's what happened. I went into professional ballet training at age 10 with the Lila Zali Ballet School in Laguna Beach and I should explain that professional ballet training is not exactly the same as taking a little bit of this or that. It’s working every day, going to class, as they call it, which is teaching your body to do some really amazing things and I went on to point about age 12 and I wanted very much to be a professional ballet dancer. But as time went by, when I was 16, I became fascinated by the idea of writing dance and this is where the story really begins. I invented Sutton DanceWriting. It's a way to read and write body movement and it's not based on anything having to do with deafness or sign language at all. I knew nothing about that world. I was in the dance world, in the music world, in the performing world and I loved it of course, but for me it was better to start using some of the talents that I was apparently born with, which was to look at movement and write it down. I was inspired by Arthur de Saint-Léon and other writing systems that already existed. There's nothing new under the sun, everybody, and there is a way to read and write dance in many different parts of the world with different writing systems so it wasn't that this was a unique or different idea to write dance but what was different was that I tried to apply my love of animation and the fact that little visual frames can turn into a film. I was fascinated by that idea which I got inspired by Walt Disney in his development of cartoons, which may seem like a funny thing to say but it isn’t. It's very, um, really the basis of SignWriting. I invented first a way to write dance movement based on the fact that if you took stick figures and put them at the corner of a book you know like every page you put another stick figure and then you flip the book so you can see the page is going, you can see a moving film. Just by yourself doing that on a little book and I got inspired by the idea that I could take a stick figure and either put it under the notes of the music so that people would know what to do under certain counts, or I could just put them from left to right with the counts like 1 2 3 1 2 3 up above and it moved like an animated film. That was where I came from in my heart and I was 16 and I was invited to choreograph a dance for a school play and I wrote it down in my attempt at a writing system at age 16 and when that happened it changed my life because even though I had wanted to be this great performer and all that, the truth was I loved writing dance. So as I grew, grew up, I became a skilled dancer enough to be able to be invited to perform and I went to Denmark at age 19, Copenhagen, Denmark, because there was a world seminar with famous ballet dancers teaching students, and I studied in this seminar in the summer of 1970. I was 19. I was all alone without any family members but I was also blessed that my family members made this possible and over time I decided to stay in Denmark and I did not leave even though I had arrived just to be there for the summer of 1970. Instead I lived there for 2 years until 1972. And I chose to study the Bournonville dance method that is very famous in Denmark. The Royal Danish Ballet is a very famous company and they were trained and used a method of dance called Bournonville and I contacted one of the leading experts on what they call The Bournonville Schools and asked her to give me private lessons so that I could record, write the Bournonville Schools in my DanceWriting system and so I recorded the Bournonville Schools and later those became published books which you can find on both DanceWriting.org and SignWriting.org . So at that time, at age 19 through 21, or so, I was writing dance and this development created a brand new world because the Danish people had never written their dances down at that time. Later on they did, but I'm just saying that they didn't at that time, and so I stimulated historically the idea that the Bournonville Schools should be preserved and written down on a piece of paper before they were forgotten because in those days dancers just danced and nobody really learned to read and write it and so it was going to be forgotten if somebody didn't write it down so I'm grateful I did what I did and in 1974 I had published my first textbook on Sutton DanceWriting it was called “Sutton Movement Shorthand” at the time and that book can be downloaded on the web on DanceWriting.org and SignWriting.org has links to it. That first book used stick figures to record the way the body looks then relating it to the timing of the music that's involved and you have a written form that a lot of dancers could read without too much education because there have been other writing systems for dance that are really complicated-looking and this looked very visual 8:09 and in 1974 a copy of my textbook was given to Flemming Flindt who was the director of the Royal Danish Ballet at that time and he invited me to come to Denmark to teach Sutton DanceWriting to the Royal Danish Ballet dancers since the whole writing system had really been developed to record the Danish dances so he felt the Danish dancers should learn it. Well of course this was an enormous honor. I arrived in Denmark in the spring of 1974 and there were some newspaper articles about the fact that I was going to be teaching the Royal Danish Ballet “DanceWriting” and these newspaper articles showed that I had a writing system that could write body movement in general and I received a telephone call from the University of Copenhagen from a researcher named Lars von der Lieth. Lars and his team worked at a center in the University that has a really long Danish name that worked with deafness and deafness research and sign language research and also hearing diagnostics for deaf people. It was a very beautiful department at the University of Copenhagen and I was also invited by others to present both DanceWriting and later Sutton Movement Writing, which is general GestureWriting, to several other groups as well. Each presentation brought about the use of Sutton Movement Writing in Denmark. Regarding the University of Copenhagen. I started a job there they actually offered me a position, and in the fall of 1974 I was teaching both the Royal Danish Ballet how to read and write dance and I was also at the University of Copenhagen. Two very different environments. Believe me, as a dancer, it's nothing to do with the University of Copenhagen so when I would arrive at the University of Copenhagen and I did my presentation it was so exciting and there were a bunch of researchers sitting in a row and they were saying hmm, Can you apply this to writing videos of deaf people signing? and and I said I don't see why not. I've never thought of it but I'd be delighted to try and then they said “Can you also write the gestures of hearing people and what they do when they're talking to each other, when they gesture, just because they're talking, not because they're using sign language? Can you write that?” I said “Yes. I'm sure I can.” Well, then could you do this as a research project with us? This was Jan Engaard Pedersen, a researcher of the times, who was studying the hearing people's gestures and trying to figure out - Yeah. Sign languages are probably different than that. But let's see, can we write the difference? That was what I was hired for. So I arrive at the University and they give me this beautiful little office. Oh it was such at honor and in those days, this is 1974, did you know, that we did not have personal computers yet? No and even though Denmark was always way ahead of everybody else no no no there - Personal computers really weren't in the world yet in 1974. They may have existed in research Labs but I did not have that in my office but we also didn't have video machines like we do today or phones of course that make videos now but in those days the actual video that they had to show me of the gestures I had to write were on a reel, you know like a reel of tape, like that, and so and then they connected that to a little TV screen so I would watch a video of five, I think it was five hearing people who were Danish, speaking Danish spoken language, with sound only but they were sitting on a couch all discussing something and they were using gestures sort of like I'm doing right now and I wrote down their gestures by watching that video many times over and then they gave me a video also totally separate of deaf people in Denmark who use Danish sign language DSL and I wrote those gestures and then I had documents and I was writing completely by hand I assure you because in those days we didn't have any computer programs for writing SignWriting at the time. All I had to do was look at these gestures and look at the Danish Sign Language of true language and how could anybody even begin to think that they were the same? I just immediately saw that Danish Sign Language was a language. You could tell everybody had real communication going where and they were saying things to each other. Nothing like the hearing people who were simply gesturing because they were sitting there and getting emotional over something so I got it all written down by hand and then I went into the lab and I told Lars von der Lieth and the researchers that I had something to show them and I showed them the two documents comparing the two and I immediately said to them I believe that Danish Sign Language is not 14:32 only a real language but that it should be written and I just wrote it and it feels like we could make a writing system that would work and it's all based on body movement so you don't have to know the language to be able to write it because my writing system is based on writing body movement without judgment so we write what we see and what we feel and I would like your permission to go to the Danish deaf clubs here in Copenhagen and get to know people and show them the SignWriting document to see what they think. Well the reaction was fascinating. This is 1974. This was before sign languages were established as real languages in the rest of the world. The first thing they said which was a wonderful thing was “Valerie, we want to give you a book by Dr. William Stokoe who is also an American who is at Gallaudet University in Washington DC and here is his book in which he has proven that sign languages are real languages, that they are truly language but before this time, before Dr William Stokoe we all thought that it was not. We thought languages had to be spoken, had to be sound, so Dr William Stokoe has already established that it's a language and he also has a way to write in the back of his book. So of course I hadn't seen this before because remember I was a dancer. I knew nothing about the Deaf World, nor did I have any connection with linguistics whatsoever. I was a movement notator. So I said “wow let me look at this”. Of course I was thrilled. I had no idea that Dr Stokoe was in the world and I was later on I actually presented with him at a conference. It was such an honor so it's not that I didn't get to know him later, but this was how I started. You wanted to know how SignWriting began? This is how it began. I was 23 years old and I was learning about the the Deaf World. so I said “I see this is based on Linguistics. The Stokoe writing system, but I'm basing mine on body movement and I'm a movement notator where his is a linguistically based writing system so two very different things. So let's see what happens If you could help me get to the Deaf Club I would be grateful and I was blessed and they took me there but boy they made me put cotton in my ears and I had never been deaf myself so they thought that would teach me what it's like to be deaf of course it didn't all it did was make it harder for me to read the lips of the Danish language which I was also learning but it wasn't really deafness it just simply pointed out to me that life isn't easy for anybody who's deaf and I know that. I just couldn't experience it because I wasn't born that way but when I arrived at the Deaf Club again it was a big honor. I had to get adjusted to a new world but they were wonderful to me. Everybody was very accepting and I showed them my SignWriting document based on the video I had written and they were reading it. They were reading it. I'm not saying that they said it was perfect. They didn’t. And I'm not saying that I had a perfect experience because I felt frustrated when a couple of things they couldn't read, which helped me go back to the drawing board and make it better and after that experience I realized that SignWriting would be the name of this writing system because I already had DanceWriting. We were calling it Sutton Movement Shorthand and Sutton Movement Writing but the name DanceWriting had already started in and so I called my new invention SignWriting. This was absolutely me who chose to do this because the researchers who were just wonderful felt that it would be a failure. They told me that they didn't think that anybody would want to read and write sign language, period, even though they know Dr Stokoe had his linguistic based system and that I'm saying that I could have a movement based system, they didn’t think it was necessary. All that mattered to them, as researchers, was to be able to record their research but they didn't think of it as some kind of writing system for the ages. So I had to accept the fact that Lars had said he didn't think it was necessary but that's okay because within just a few years in 1982 I was back working in Denmark and the written system called Sutton SignWriting was used 19:26 in the Danish school system from 1982 until 1988 and deaf children were reading and writing sign language as beautifully as anybody would ever want they were truly bilingual with Danish spoken language and Danish Sign Language written side by side and SignWriting gave them their writing system and at that time Lars von der Lieth said to me “well Valerie, you proved me wrong but I'm glad you did because the Danish School System is really using SignWriting.” so just to go back to how SignWriting began, when I was in this Deaf Club in Denmark I met a few famous Danish deaf people and those people I ended up working with for years and by the way even at my old age of 72 in 2023 I have had contact with many of these Danish deaf and hearing people whom I worked with back in 1974. Can you believe that the world is continuing? when you get older, you think ah I guess it's all over but it's not. SignWriting will be 50 years old in 2024 because 1974 was its starting point and I helped the researchers write their data that they needed from their videos and I completed my course of DanceWriting at the Royal Danish ballet in 1974. I then returned to Denmark in 1975 and worked again with the University of Copenhagen to write more data for their research and in 1978, I believe, Jan Endgaard Pedersen published his research with SignWriting showing the data. I then published small booklets one of them “Examples of a Danish Deaf Sign Language” which shows the notation that I did for them in the research lab and I also published the”Bournonville Schools” in the DanceWriting world and we also published other things like, I worked with a a researcher named Rolf Kuschel who is quite famous in Denmark for having researched the sign language of a deaf person on a South Pacific island and he took videos of that deaf person's language and then he came back to Denmark in the research lab and we met and he asked if I could write down the movements from video of the deaf person on the South Pacific island and of course I said yes and so I have a booklet now showing how I 22:34 wrote the movements of this deaf person signing. He was the only deaf person on the island because he was the son of the chief and the chief um of that tribe didn't want him to be killed but other deaf children were not allowed to live so he was the only deaf child in the whole place and must have been been rough right? and his sign language was very um the whole body you know uh including squatting and everything else so I wrote that and I also have that up online for you to look at but that was more almost like Movement Writing, in a sense, because the whole body was involved he even sat on the ground and I had to write the sitting on the ground because it was a a part of the language. It was his way of showing different things so I did many things and while 23:28 I was in Denmark in the 1970s I also was hired by Rigshospitalet which is a hospital in Denmark and there was a psychologist who asked me to write from video the movements of an autistic child compared to the movements of uh his brother who was not autistic and so we wrote. We used Sutton MovementWriting to write gesture and to show the differences between Autism movements and what they would consider normal movements so I have all these documents I even wrote physical therapy I can't remember oh and then I wrote Mime. I taught Sutton DanceWriting at Tivoli Gardens. There's a Pantomime Theatre “The Pantomime Theatre” where people have performed pantomime and ballet on stage at this beautiful park called “Tivoli Gardens”. They perform there every summer and I was hired to write the movements of some of the Mime that was done on stage but also to train the ballet dancers who worked at the Pantomime Theatre how to read and write dance and we actually sat on a Raked Stage. I don't know whether you know what a Raked Stage is but it's a stage that “slants” um so that people in the audience can see people down at the bottom of the stage. They can see people up at the upper part of the stage, by the Rake, instead of having the audience slant. It's the stage that is slanted. So I actually based a lot of my invention later on on the Raked Stage concept and that you will notice throughout DanceWriting and SignWriting. I was also uh working with a Mime artist from Cirkus Benneweis which was across the way from Tivoli Garden where an American mime 25:33 artist Robin Merman was performing Mime and he and I worked together to create a book on writing Sutton MimeWriting. So by the time the 70s drew to a close I had invented Sutton DanceWriting, Sutton SignWriting, Sutton Movement Writing, Sutton MimeWriting, and we also worked with physical therapy and writing facial expressions of a mother relating to her child while she was nursing the baby. That was fascinating. That was also at Rigshospitalet, at the hospital where the psychologist was who asked me to write the autistic child. That was another project. In the 1980s everything changed because I had already been teaching Sutton DanceWriting for 4 years at the Boston Conservatory of Music's Dance Department in Boston and when I was in Boston I knew I had this SignWriting system from Denmark and what was I going to do with it in the United States? I wanted to share it with people so that we could find out if it would be useful to far more than just Denmark. Because it can write any sign language so why not? So it just happens that the Boston Conservatory of Music is a beautiful college that is located in a part of Boston that is right near Northeastern University, so I got out at lunch once and walked down the street to Northeastern University in Boston and Northeastern University is famous for a department of sign language research. There was Dr Harlan Lane at that time who was very well known in the research world and I was blessed to meet Dr Judy Shephard-Kegl (KEGL) at the University, Northeastern University, and I was able to show Dr Kegl , Judy, my SignWriting work from Denmark and she so kindly invited me to present at the Linguistic Society of America and the presentation was actually held at MIT that's “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” and I thank you, Judy, forever because you did so much for me to be able to show people for the first time in the United States SignWriting. So that was the way SignWriting began in the United States is because Judy Shephard-Kegl invited me to present in Boston and when we did that it changed my life because all kinds of things started to happen in 1977 during this time. That I was at the Boston Conservatory of Music in the Dance Department teaching DanceWriting, SignWriting started to blossom and in 1977 I presented Sutton SignWriting at a conference with Dr Stokoe. He and I stood on the same stage and we compared our writing systems in front of every everybody. It was an exciting event in 1977. I will put links for you and then also in 1977 I believe I was at The National Theatre of the Deaf and in Connecticut they had a summer program and I taught SignWriting there and some DanceWriting to the performers and that's where I met some famous deaf people Linda Bove and from Sesame Street and especially Bernard Bragg, with whom I worked with later, so that's the very beginning of SignWriting in the United States and we started writing American Sign Language and in the early 80s I started a new era where I returned to California and with my nonprofit organization the Center for Sutton Movement Writing, we started writing the SignWriter Newspaper. I hired 10 native signing people, I think eight of them were deaf, born deaf and two of them were hearing. They were born into deaf families though and they were “native signers” and we wrote the first newspaper in history written in the movements, the body movement of sign languages. It was mainly written in American Sign Language but we did have some articles in Danish Sign Language and that era I will tell you about in another video. Thank you for listening to the early development of SignWriting.