By Cadence Redmond

“A World Without Them” by Landon Krentz and Eric Rose premiered on Sept. 17 at 7:30 p.m. at the Clarice Performing Arts Center and, according to several audience members, shifted the minds of deaf and hearing audiences alike.

The performance was rooted in creator and actor Krentz’s personal experiences as a deaf person. According to Krentz, he drew on influences from his childhood growing up in a hearing community. Much of the performance deals with extinction and is influenced by the cultural extinction of deaf communities.

The visual vernacular show used movement and expression to tell the story of evolution as a cautionary tale through a timeline of extinction and endangerment.

Krentz correlated the oppression of deaf individuals to the extinction of animals across time at the hands of humans.

“Those animals, I felt a connection to. It was more emotional when he [Krentz] was showing the people destroying the animals,” JB Begue of Towson University’s Deaf Studies Program signed. “It was very powerful for me.”

The story was told through interpretive dance, surround sound, lights, prop work and classifiers. Krentz clarified that a classifier is “a hand shape with a movement that represents something … for people who have no knowledge of sign or ASL.”

Krentz played a total of 39 different characters, with one main character he kept returning to, which he left up to interpretation. The character would hold a giant eye and sometimes an orb representing Earth.

The audience was made up of both hearing and deaf people who experienced the show differently.

Dakota Hickerson, a graduate student in theater and performance studies at the University of Maryland, said that she felt like the experience was “eye-opening.” She said the show felt as if the tables had been turned as, unlike most stage productions, it had been made with deaf people in mind.

“My dream was to show a story that benefits both hearing and deaf audiences,” Krentz signed.

Krentz worked with hearing director Eric Rose of Ghost River Theatre, who said that, as a person with dyslexia and ADHD, the visual world was extremely important to him. Rose described the visual aspects as metaphorically and physically speaking to the audience. 

Rose explained that the show demonstrates that deaf culture is still alive. He feels that when we try to make everything, especially in performance art, the same, we lose the vibrancy and abundance.

When Krentz was young, he lived in a hearing family and did not get exposed to a lot of deaf culture until he moved to Vancouver, Canada, and began his sign language learning journey.

“I was actually a farm boy. I lived in the countryside, so it was a very isolating and oppressive community,” Krentz signed.

Deaf people have been one of many groups who have been oppressed over the centuries. Krentz signed about how, at the Milan Conference in 1880, educators at the meeting decided to ban the use of sign language in schools, and Alexander Graham Bell, best known for the telephone, also pushed for oralism. 

While at the university, Krentz helped teach a number of classes throughout the week, including a dance class in the School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. The director of the TDPS program is deaf faculty member, Jill Bradbury.

“I was really impressed with his artistry but also his warmth and support for the people that he works with,” Bradbury said. “And I thought he would be a great guest to bring to UMD … to expose our students to an artistic performance tradition that they may not know anything about.”

Featured Image: Actor Landon Krentz performing on stage on Sept. 17, 2026. Photo by Duncan Holditch.