Jiřička / Tarnovski: Vnitřní světla zapnuta (Cabin Lights On: The Inner Light)
Vnitřní světla zapnuta (Cabin Lights On: The Inner Light): A documentary exploration of two audio worlds — schools for the visually and hearing impaired — partially created in the spaces of D29, is now available to listen to online: ČRo Vltava.
Although people with hearing impairment or total deafness communicate using sign language, it does not mean there is silent communication. Likewise, communication without strong expression, power, and inner sound, rhythm, and melody does not exist. Even the mouths of the completely deaf speak; their bodies communicate in space. The whole world resonates—it has rhythm, its own melody, color, and expressive power.
This documentary composition is about sight and hearing, about communication and loss that is not really a loss, but rather a different possibility and quality. It is precisely about these qualities—the sharpening of other senses and ways of perceiving the world. It is a probe into the unusually intense sound environments of schools with their unique teaching methods and people involved (not only teachers but also the helpful sign language interpreter Jindřich Mareš), as well as devices and machines that assist in education. It is also a landscape shaped and structured by dreams, skills, specific games and sports, and vast imagination. School creepypastas, small and large buildings, flight simulators, or movement underwater also freely move within it, along with the specific rhythm of language, body, and gestures.
An unexpected descent into the layers of another way of “reading” the world and the problem—how to represent with sound what lies behind or beyond sound itself—turned out to be not only a fruitful space for radio work, but above all unusually attractive as a dramaturgical and compositional challenge, raising questions about how to capture these two radically marginal and different spheres at all.
Cabin Lights On — a composition about different hierarchies of the senses, specific forms of teaching, but also a musical-reportage portrait of people willing to overcome possible obstacles.
Directed and sound by: Lukáš Jiřička and Jaroslav Tarnovski
Featuring: pupils, students, and teachers from Jaroslav Ježek Schools in Prague and the Secondary Vocational School, High School, Elementary School, and Kindergarten on Štefánikova Street in Hradec Králové.
