Re: “How ‘No Limits’ Mainstreams Its Students” and “‘Silent No More’ Comes to the Douglas”
With a significant date at hand on Friday night at the Kirk Douglas Theatre for the deaf community of Culver City and the Westside, this would be a propitious time to renew acquaintances with No Limits for Deaf Children.
At home on the second story of a bank building in the bosom of Downtown, No Limits is a 20-year-old after-school program for deaf and hard-of-hearing children from ages 5 to 18.
Elizabeth Sanchez, aide to the founding executive director, recently was describing the mission of this exuberant teacher, Dr. Michelle Christie.
The founder spent years in the entertainment industry.
This becomes immediately evident when guests are ushered into the arresting technicolor space that is the home of this most unusual academy of the arts for the young who are slightly, but correctably, different from the widest stream of the population.
The objective of Dr. Christie and her faculty is to seamlessly alter the students’ path — almost invisibly, but enduringly, transporting them to Main Street America.
As she led a tour through a series of imaginative rooms, appointed to delicately but firmly retain a child’s concentration, Ms. Sanchez explained:
“Dr. Christie designed an after-school theatre program to help develop communication skills, and to expand their vocabulary and grammar. She wants them to understand character development through role playing, She wants to cultivate creativity and to develop their public speaking skills.”
While all of those motivations are enormously and admirably ambitious, they inject boundary-less energy and renewed hope into curious youthful minds.
By the time students effectively graduate from No Limits for Deaf Children, Dr. Christie believes they have been suffused with previously undreamed of confidence to unapologetically enter the hearing world.
To the Theatre
Students from No Limits for Deaf Children may be in the audience at the Kirk Douglas Theatre at 8 Friday evening when the No Limits Theater Group’s hit original production, Silent No More, returns with a new cast sharing their inspiring life stories.
Created as a theatrical documentary, Silent No More is an intimate evening featuring readings by Kathy Buckley, Samantha Dudley, Henry Greenfield, Julie Heimler, Iris Lee, Ivy Lee, Nanci Linke-Ellis, Johnny Palmer, Yajaira Pelayo, Michelle Tang, Claudia Vasquez, and Enid Wizig. Ms. Wizig, who turned 92 years old last March, is the after-school’s senior volunteer.
