Soundlessly Soaring
Joseph Templin, left, who is deaf, and his dance instructor Debra Sternberg at America Restaurant in Tysons Corner. (Marvin Joseph - The Washington Post)
By Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 1, 2000; Page A01
She studied the boy from across a dance floor last winter, moved more by what he made her feel than by what she saw. A dance instructor for six years, she had all the steps, but this kid had all those moves and something more, a grace, a soul to make her eyes well up, so joyous did he look out there.
Debra Sternberg studied Joseph Templin the way you study a natural phenomenon, thinking she had seldom seen a dancer with such natural flair for the jitterbug and the Lindy, the steps she taught for a living.
She approached his mother, Carla, one of her more than 600 dance students, looking for permission to dance with the boy. The mother encouraged her. The chatty middle-aged woman and the quiet boy jitterbugged, off and on, for the next four weeks on crowded dance floors, but not once did Templin speak to Sternberg. He mouthed hi at the beginning and thank you at the end of their dances, then moved on.
"I just thought he wasn't very talkative," she remembers. "And then one night, one of Joe's brothers says to me, 'He's deaf, you know.'
"I was flabbergasted, not only that he was deaf, but more that he could do what he does without being able to hear the music. I see so many people who aren't very good, who stink. And he just had this uncanny grace and intuitive sense of how to swing dance. The amazing thing is he's in his first year of doing it. He has phenomenal potential, which has nothing at all to do with being deaf or cute. Dance is the only currency here. You either can dance or you can't. He can."
They are dance partners now, getting ready for the Virginia State Open, a swing dance competition to begin at the Westpark Hotel in Tysons Corner in late September.
The two are an unlikely pairing. Sternberg is 46, funny, saucy, brunette, happily married, good with her sashaying hips, lithe in her dancer's body, with a Web site called gottaswing. Templin is 18, still a kid with braces, lanky, handsome, Brazilian-dark, smooth-skinned and certain to be the focus of the upcoming competition because of his condition and his gift.
Templin, who lives in Centreville, is pleased but unsurprised. A graduate of Fairfax County's Woodson High School, he will be off to Gallaudet University next month to start his freshman year, en route to what he hopes will be a career in computer Web design, and dance is simply one more passion in a life teeming with them.
"This just shows deaf people can dance, too, which we always knew," he says, his mother translating his sign language. "We can do everything the hearing can do. My attitude in life is: Do whatever it is you want to do. No excuses. I knew I could do this. I knew I would. I'm not amazed."
He grins and brushes his hand across the air, a mini-tennis backhand that, in Joe Templin's nuanced signing, means, whatever, yada-yada-yada, a self-deprecating touch here. He amends his thoughts in that instant. "I know that lately things have been great," he says.
It has been a very good year for Templin, who turns 19 today and always has been able to measure his success by how much he surprises the hearing world.
As a small child, long before he started swaying to Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, he tried mimicking the dance steps of Michael Jackson by watching the pop legend's music videos, which is like picking up a violin and trying to be Heifetz, or fingering a chess pawn with plans to be the next Bobby Fischer. It mattered not at all that Templin couldn't hear a note. After a while, he didn't bother looking at the screen, blessed with the sense of what would be happening next.
Even then, according to those close to him, he had the thing, that ineffable thing, the gift, the beat, an internal clock pulsating in him like the perfect metronome. Coupled with nimble feet and housefly-like reflexes, the instinct enabled the kid to do what most of the hearing on the planet only could fantasize about. You want a Moonwalk, a slide step, an aerial twirling of his partner: Joe Templin can deliver.
"I guess I have natural rhythm, natural talent," he says in sign language, and the halting movement of his hands betrays a certain shyness. "God-given. Luck."
But the luck sprang from misfortune. A bout of meningitis took his hearing as a Brazilian toddler when he lived in Sao Paulo under circumstances never to be completely understood by the Templins, who adopted him at age 3 and brought him to Northern Virginia. Eleven of the Templins' 14 children are adopted, from countries as far away as Korea and Guatemala, and Joe remembers the house ethos being simple: You will do everything the other kids do, because nothing but you can hold you back.
"Profoundly deaf"--it's his mother's term. But it doesn't quite capture the shades of his condition or life. "Profoundly" doesn't mean total, not quite, says Joe, who hears the faintest bass vibrations sometimes when he stands close to speakers.
And though he can never hear a note of music, he senses a changing in the air's energy when it comes. "The nothing is replaced by a something," he says. "I know in the air when there is something; it's different than the nothing. I just don't know what it is. I can't describe it."
We live in an either/or world, he thinks sadly. Either you're tall or short; either you're disabled or you're not, when that's so . . . limiting, he'd like to tell people. It would be nice if the rest of the world could just see him as deft and deaf, thinks Templin.
He sounds fairly amused when talking about rock, pop, hip-hop, rap, having arrived at a stage in life when many of his contemporaries gravitate to groups like Blink 182 and Nine Inch Nails. "It's probably good music," he says diplomatically. "But I can't dance to it. Swing I can feel in here"--he points to his chest. "The rhythms I can feel forever. It's sensual."
With a finger to his chin, he entertains a question about how he performs the nifty trick of dancing without hearing. Nothing has amazed Debra Sternberg more than what Templin does in the opening seconds of their dances.
"Because he has no way of knowing when the music has begun, he needs a cue," she says. "So either he looks to see when other couples move, or I'll make a very slight movement. When I do it, he's on it in a nanosecond, even before I've finished thinking about it. He's leading me even before I'm fully aware."
Joe Templin is no better able to explain his gift than the young basketball prodigy who seems to walk on air above rims. "I think many more deaf people have gifts that the hearing don't see because they're thinking about what we don't have," he says.
He feels no loss, he says, certainly no psychic ache at the realization that he will never hear swing music or its mysterious parts, a clarinet, a drum, a sax--all these instruments he knows intimately like a scholar but only in the abstract, as a paleontologist knows the dinosaur.
"See, it doesn't matter that I can't hear or can hear," he says, signing in an intense blur now, his mother translating. "I'm never envious. I have my own special talent. And I can see how the music makes people feel by the way they move and bob and smile. I feel it then. The music and rhythms are in here." He thumps that chest again. "Nothing can get those."
The hands come to rest. His index finger flicks a switch, and the music begins with a song that he knows is in the air the way the astronomer knows the stars are out there.
Then he stands, reaches for his mother's hands and, with the speakers blaring and Natalie Cole belting out a raucous swing version of "Route 66," he twirls her, dips her, flips her over his leg. She squeals girlishly. He signs a message to her in a flash. "This is a variation of the Lindy Hop," she says, grinning. Joseph's head bobs, eyes closed. "He's telling you, 'Pay attention to this beat. Isn't it great? Isn't it?' Wow."
He feels it on a different frequency, one beyond most dancers.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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By HopMichael (Mhwang) on Thursday, August 03, 2000 - 04:55 pm: Edit