THE SIGN DANCE

In 2021 the Italian Sign Language (ISL) was finally recognized as an official language by the Italian Parliament.

Despite this important milestone, to which Italy reached last in Europe, a very small part of Italian population (about 100K) knows ISL: mainly deaf, their families and interpreters. 

The Italian Deaf Association asked us a creative idea to start changing that in order to make ISL an everyday language, known by as many people as possible, and to take another important step towards integration.

The goal of the campaign is to make available to hearing people a set of useful and simple expressions in ISL so they can easily communicate with deaf every day.

We turned TikTok dances into Sign Language tutorials.
Since ISL is made of gestures and facial expressions, the parallelism with TikTok choreographies was therefore immediate and spontaneous.
So, we selected some simple - yet useful - phrases from the most famous Italian pop songs and translated them into ISL.
Then, we matched the ISL translations with the music, creating original TikTok ballets to give people – especially young ones - a fun and immediate way to start learning by dancing.

The choice of singers and songs was not random.

We carefully selected the tracks that were trending on TikTok and the music talents with the largest fan bases on social media, in order to organically reach the widest audience in the shortest amount of time.

Moreover, we approached nationwide famous influencers and media that were consistent with the brand's value and sympathetic to the cause. This triggered a chain effect whereby “the more people talked about it, the more everyone wanted to”.

As we posted our content, the authors of the choreographed songs start giving visibility to the project.

Their first shares on social media triggered a domino effect and increased the buzz: their fan bases started dueting TikToks of their favorite songs and using #TheSignDance.

One thing led to another: a number of influencers, magazines and media outlets took interest in the social trend and further boosted the initiative, eventually spontaneously bringing The Sign Dance to the attention of national news outlets, newspapers and popular TV shows.

ENS (Italian Deaf Association) - The Sign Dance

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