"It's a very strong moment (...) Finally, we meet again! We find ourselves in our sign language and it feels good!" Rejoices Juliette Van Tornhout, 28-year-old specialist educator.

In a green dress with sequins and sneakers, the young woman dances in front of the stage, under the changing lights of the spotlights.

The music rocks the room.

The public applauds - silently, waving hands high - the performance of artists beloved by the hearing impaired, such as Presilia Kette and VinzSlam, who sign with a frenzied rhythm the rap of Eminem or Bigflo & Oli.

The Deaf Party, organized at Le Phare, a concert hall in Tournefeuille, a suburb of Toulouse, is hosted by Winona Guyon and Lucas Wild, actors from the Skam France series.

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This "deaf evening" is the highlight of Sign'ô, a first for this visual arts festival, created in 2007 by the company ACT'S (Art, culture and theater in signs) and which is reborn after six years of suspension, due to lack of resources and the Covid crisis.

Shows, concerts, workshops

For a whole weekend, more than a thousand people, according to the organizers, gathered from September 16 to 18.

Under an alley of plane trees in the heart of the city, craftsmen's stands, stage welcoming percussionists, comedians and conferences, shows in the surrounding theaters... all the atmosphere of a festival is there.

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Except the hubbub of voices: around the tables, conversations are going well, in signs, translated if necessary by volunteers who master this language, like some 300,000 people in France.

"We are happy (...) with this bath with all the deaf. At home, there are not enough associations, in theater there is nothing. So we move when there are events like that", signs for AFP Sophie Bottagisi, 37, who came from Nice with family and friends.

Her daughter Stella, 10, fourth generation deaf, loved the "movements with the feet", learned during a hip hop workshop led by Agathe Grelaud.

The dancer shows how to move the joints one by one, then gives the children the start of the sequences, signing with a pat on the head.

Victoria Bubnova, 9, already knows the technique.

The music "goes through the body, like when you actually touch me (...) I feel the vibrations", explains the girl, introduced to classical music at age 3, then last year to hip hop.

"I like it! It's like boys: we move, we take big steps."

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Along with horse riding, swimming and painting, hip hop is one of the activities offered to students at Jean-Jaurès, a bilingual sign language school in Ramonville-Saint-Agne, another town bordering Toulouse, where Victoria is educated.

"We came here for the bilingual classes," says her mother Irina Pavlyuk, 36, a Russian yoga teacher who arrived in France fifteen years ago with her husband, a dancer.

Festival-goers from all over France

"They say that Toulouse is the capital of the deaf because there are a lot of things: education with a 100% bilingual stream up to the baccalaureate, which does not exist elsewhere in France (...) associations, activities", adds Marylène Charrière, president of ACT's and of the Sign'ô organizing committee.

Other festivals for the deaf exist, such as Clin d'oeil in Reims, but not in the south.

"People have come from Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon to meet here", welcomes the president, also director of the show L'Oeil et la main, on France 5.

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The six shows organized in two theaters with 200 and 400 seats were almost sold out.

And at the end of the Saturday evening, the fever took hold of the Deaf Party, the dancers chaining a long farandole around the room.

"Welcome is in our language. We share the same culture, the same identity. When we meet, we can let go!" Laughs Marylène Charrière, determined to prepare the next Sign'ô for 2024.

© 2022 AFP