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Editor’s note: The images in the slideshow document a conversation on paper between the writer and artist Louise Stern and theatre director Omar Elerian, although they contain other voices Louise has edited the conversation by tearing it into fragments and recomposing it as a collage, the method she employs in much of her artistic practice She also contributes the below text:   Observations on communication and language have long bitten at my heels, demanding that I find some form or other to convey their urgency I have tried to obey them in different ways: through art, performance, literature When, a few years ago, it occurred to me that theatre might bring together the strands that I had been working along, a series of generous coincidences led me to the theatre director Omar Elerian   Omar split his childhood between Italy and Palestine, where his father was born The rich presence of his Palestinian grandmother, with whom he shared no common language, stood large in his childhood Because they had no words for one another, they turned to eye contact, to food, to touch, gesture, and the potency of sharing the same spaceThe mystery and magic of the other’s life was allowed to collect between them without compression into words and ideas   This is something that I feel deeply through my deafness, which pushes me up against visceral experience, and this is one of the reasons that the collaboration with Omar has become so meaningful for me The play we have developed together is about how words so often mask physical, sensual reality In The Ugly Birds, each of the three characters struggles in their different ways with life in a world that is saturated with language For each of them, a point arrives where their physical reality can no longer be reconciled with that world It incorporates choreographed physical gesture and projected written conversations as well as spoken dialogue   In my native sign language, there is the potential for distilled physical expression The closest thing that I have to compare this to is painting or dance – mediums that allow for boundless sensation While