OVER the past year, the arts have been coming together in a nationwide celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Few events, however, have looked beyond the ephemeral moment, and created incentives for changing attitudes in audiences and practitioners alike, with such visionary resolve as the forthcoming collaboration between Company Chordelia and Solar Bear.

When Kally Lloyd-Jones, founder-director of Company Chordelia, traces the origins of Lady Macbeth: unsex me here, which opens at Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree tomorrow before touring across Scotland, one of the determining factors she had in mind was the nature of language – Shakespeare’s, of course, alongside the movement vocabulary that characters Chordelia’s dance-theatre productions. But she’d also been thinking about the gestural communication found in British Sign Language (BSL), and had in mind devising a dance-theatre choreography that would incorporate it.

“I’m always trying, in my work, to embed meaning into movement,” is how Lloyd-Jones explains what drew her to BSL. “I do feel there has to be a purpose to what some-one is doing on-stage, and for me BSL is a visual, visceral, descriptive language that is all about communication.” Developing that idea was one of her "pending" projects. The other was, in a way, a continuation of the thoughts and questions that had accrued from working on Scottish Opera’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth.

“I’d initially choreographed it – Dominic Hill was the director – but then I’d subsequently been the revival director and each time I found myself wanting to know more about Lady Macbeth herself,” says Lloyd-Jones. No help for it: her creative curiosity whetted, she decided that a Company Chordelia dance-theatre piece would delve into the "missing bits".

So, two ideas in the pipeline - which one to do first? “I woke up one morning,” she says, laughing at how a night’s sleep had resolved matters, “and I just knew: they should be the same show. And where better to start than with Shakespeare’s language as the basis for the dance language and using BSL as well.”

Whereupon she contacted Gerry Ramage, artistic director of Solar Bear, the Glasgow-based theatre company that brings D/deaf performers centre-stage in its award-winning productions. Ramage finds the natural collaboration just as amusing.

“Kally told me afterwards that she was surprised at how quickly I responded,” he says. “That surprised me! It seemed so obvious I’d want to be involved because her ideas sat really well with me, and with what we do. It was such a remarkable opportunity, and I said ‘yes’ straight away.” Lloyd-Jones murmurs that such rapid, positive responses are, in her experience, very rare, hence the surprise.

Ramage, however, had sound reasons to agree. “I already love dance, but listening to Kally, it really struck me as good sense for BSL – which can be so beautiful and expressive – to go into choreography. More than that, I was really keen to see how a deaf dancer would work in that environment, and even more particularly, I was keen for audiences to see that working.”

His words are the succinct essence of the advocacy that Solar Bear has carried at its core since it was established in 2002. When Ramage adds that the timing of Lady Macbeth: unsex me here couldn’t be better, there’s a personal note of satisfaction as a well as a professional one in that comment. Ramage will be stepping down as artistic director early next year and this production feels like a milestone, not least because it will see Solar Bear involved in the Edinburgh Fringe for the very first time next summer, so the show will be a continuing legacy with the company.

What also excited, and reassured him, about the whole project was seeing how the work evolved in the studio. There was no vestige of tokenism. Jacob Casselden, the deaf actor/dancer that Ramage had suggested was a full participant in both the creative process and the resulting choreography. Meanwhile, for Lloyd-Jones, and for her two other cast members – Jack Webb and Thomas J. Bayliss – the making of this piece has introduced new levels of awareness into the act and art of performance.

Lloyd-Jones describes how “during one run through, we – Tom, Jack, the stage-manager, and myself – all wore ear-plugs, so as we could come closer to how it was for Jacob. No music, no foot-falls, no sound of anyone’s breathing, just the movement, with the BSL everyone uses embedded in it.

"For me, it meant discovering that, even without sound, this was still a very watchable show. Hearing and non-hearing audiences will experience it differently, but they will all see the same show. For all of us, what started out as an exploration of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth – danced, as it was acted in his time, by men – has taken us on a remarkable new journey. By bringing BSL into the choreography, the movement truly means something detailed and distinct, bodies are really speaking, genuinely saying something to us all.”

www.chordelia.co.uk; www.solarbear.org.uk