The 66th season of the beloved Kentucky Shakespeare Festival kicks off on May 27th! Even if you’re not a devout Shakespeare fan, don’t let hearing loss deter you from attending this iconic, free, family-friendly event in our community.
Hearing Challenges at Festivals
Festivals and outdoor performances can present difficulties for people with hearing loss. While many indoor theatres are engineered to have favorable acoustics, an outdoor amphitheater is prone to sound distortion and echo from the wide-open spaces, excessive background noise from the environment and reduced sound quality the further you get from the stage.
Speech clarity can be especially difficult in this environment. As if acoustics, echoes and sound distortion weren’t enough, Shakespeare wrote in an older form of English (specifically, in Early Modern English), so while the syntax is close enough to modern English, it still will sound unfamiliar to you, requiring you to think a little harder to understand what the characters are saying. If your auditory processing center is overworked as it is with hearing loss, Shakespeare’s English can be incredibly challenging.
Tips to Improve Your Experience
With a little planning, you can fully immerse yourself in the live performances and atmosphere of the event. Here are our recommendations.
Wear Your Hearing Aids
This may seem obvious, but it’s worth emphasizing. Don’t leave your hearing aids at home for an event like this. Their advanced speech amplification and background noise suppression features will prove invaluable for picking up the dialogue. They also give you the ability to adjust the volume as you need in especially loud or quiet scenes, which can be incredibly beneficial for protecting your residual hearing or making sure you don’t miss a critical moment.
In fact, come visit us at Heuser Hearing Institute before the festival so we can create a customized listening program optimized for outdoor listening!
Choose Your Seat Wisely
To get the best sound, you’ll want to sit close to the stage. Try to arrive early to stake out a prime spot towards the front and in the center, rather than off to the side.
Bring a Friend
Shared enjoyment will make the event more memorable, but having a companion (or two) can also help significantly with hearing challenges. They may be able to help clarify any dialogue, and during intermission, you can discuss the play, effectively catching up on anything you may have missed.
That said, be wary of too much chatter during the performance; while chitchatting and reacting to the play can be fun, it also creates more noise for your brain to process.
Silence Your Phone
Better yet, turn it off entirely. This can eliminate an extra source of noise (yes, you can wait on checking that email), and limit distractions, as you won’t be using up cognitive resources wanting to (and resisting) checking your phone.
All the World’s a Stage!
The opening play for the festival this year is “As You Like It,” which is the play in which the famous line “all the world’s a stage” appears. Don’t miss a moment on the stage and enjoy this incredible event to the fullest. We don’t want you to miss out on one of Louisville’s most cherished cultural events. Come see us, or ask us to come see you, before you go to get the most out of every sound.