When Ana Maria Belo steps on stage, she is focused on more than just remembering her lines and which props to grab.
At any given moment, she is thinking about the pitch of other performer's voices and where they project sound from, her proximity to them, and the acoustics of the space; she is sensing sound through touch and vibration, and she is lip-reading and looking for physical cues from other performers to discern the rhythm and speed of their speech and whether they're speaking with a mumble or an accent.
It's a lot of listening — but not in the conventional sense.
As one of a handful of Australian mainstage performers who also happens to be deaf, Belo is constantly grappling with things most non-d/Deaf performers take for granted.
"I say that I've got a superpower in that I can lip-read across a room — which I can — but I also have to [ask]: 'Do I know the person? What do I think they might be talking about? What else is happening in their face? Where do they make sound in their body? Where is the sound vibrationally?'" she explains.
Having been deaf most of her working life, Belo has learned to listen with her whole body.
"I'm very grateful for it [my deafness] because I think it's forced me to focus more. It makes me super sharp, and while I can't hear, I can listen.
"If you just listen, you know what to do next."
Belo has been performing in plays and musicals on stage and behind the camera in film and television for more than 20 years. She teaches singing and acting and has written and produced her own shows.
There is a sense of control that comes with being on stage that drew her to a career in performance.
"The stage is my safe space. The world can be falling down around me but as soon as I make it onto the stage, I know that everything will be OK because I can control what's around me," she explains.
While Belo uses hearing aids, she grew up without them. Instead, she learned as a small child to rely on a combination of lip-reading and visual sequencing – physical cues that provide context for spoken language.
"Everyone uses 'colourful', as an example, which looks like, 'I love you,' but my favourite is 'vacuum', which also looks like 'fuck you,'" she laughs.
Belo is full of cheek and charm. Petite in stature, she jokes that she only started being cast in adult roles when she turned 30. But at 45, her career is burgeoning in a way that most would associate with an "up-and-comer".
This year alone, she's received critical acclaim for her performance in the SBS series It's Fine, I'm Fine, including best performance at the Marseilles Web Fest Awards (the series, for which she co-wrote an episode, was selected for the Canneseries program and is also up for an AACTA award); she has had on-screen roles in ABC series Mikki vs the World and the yet-to-be-released eight-part Disney+ series Last Days of the Space Age; she has appeared in Chalkface for the Sydney Theatre Company; and performed four months of a national tour of 9 to 5 the Musical in a supporting role, which made her the first deaf performer with hearing aids to be cast in a major commercial musical in Australia.
The past 12 months have been among the busiest in Belo's working life.
But her career hasn't all been smooth sailing.
A quiet kid from a big family
One of three kids to a dressmaker and a "pebble-crete" installer (think: the pebbled concrete linings typically found in swimming pools), Belo grew up in Dulwich Hill in Sydney's Inner West, where her family has lived for more than 40 years.
"We've got Everybody Loves Raymond happening over there," she quips.
Her elderly parents are still in the same house and she and her younger brother live nearby to help with caring responsibilities.
As a kid, Belo was quiet — except in family settings.
"I used to joke that I didn't know I was deaf because my family is so loud. I come from a big Portuguese family, so if we were at a wedding I'd be the first one up on the dance floor — even at the age of three.
"But as soon as I went to school, you didn't hear from me; I was super quiet. I found out later that it was because of my hearing," she says.
At school, Belo shied away from asking questions and would instead pre-empt answers.
"I think I was sequencing, which was probably the most important thing for me in learning to link from one thing to another."
She explains "sequencing" as the process of piecing together visual and gestural cues, including lip-reading, to make sense of verbal language.
She and her younger brother Ed would play lip-reading games by turning the TV volume down and guessing what the presenter — often Bert Newton, she adds — was saying.
"No-one knew I was having hearing issues, it was just our game, and [in hindsight] that was invaluable."
At seven, Belo had ear grommets inserted, but it wasn't until she was 14 that she realised she was experiencing hearing loss in her right ear.
She recalls the moment she told her mum: "The difference was black and white, and I said to her, 'I can't hear.' But she went 'full wog' mum and [leaned in, saying loudly], 'Can you hear me now?'"
"So I just thought, 'OK, fine,' and I left it."
About a month later, a trip to the GP revealed she had a cyst in her ear. It was an 'I told you so' moment for the then-14-year-old.
It was two years before she was able to have surgery to remove the cyst, by which time it had grown.
"It ate through the eardrum, two of the bones behind my ear and was [protruding] into the balance tubes as well."
Several years later, when Belo was at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), she had reconstructive surgery to reintroduce some of the missing bones, but it didn't improve her hearing.
Belo was 19 when she got into the prestigious acting school. She'd auditioned a year before at the insistence of her godmother, but admits she didn't know what she was in for.
"She [my godmother] said, 'If you're going to be a performer, you have to go to NIDA,' and I said, 'What the hell's a NIDA?'"
She got in on her second attempt and it was then that she began to embrace and talk about her deafness more openly.
Singing on deaf ears
All through her primary and secondary schooling, Belo had kept her deafness a secret.
"Mum always said, 'Don't say anything because they'll treat you differently,' and I'm kind of glad she did that because I wasn't treated any differently.
"My teachers at school, my music teachers — none of them knew. We'd have to write out intervals and separate instrumental lines, which taught me how to filter sound.
"I learnt how to sing on deaf ears," she says.
Belo continued to perform with partial hearing for many years. She was cast in her first major commercial musical, Fame, at the age of 22, shortly after graduating from NIDA and before attempting a third reconstruction.
"They woke me up in the middle of that one. For nine seconds I had perfect hearing."
But it too ultimately failed.
Over the next several years, Belo performed in numerous stage shows both here and abroad, spending three years in London. She was proud of her deafness but says she still felt she had to be careful with who she told.
"I never knew how anyone was going to take it. I noticed that things were starting to get harder for me, but I didn't really investigate it at the time," she reflects.
When Belo returned from London in 2006, the audition process for musicals had changed significantly, she recalls. For the first time, the pre-audition form, which performers are required to fill out with personal details, included the question, "Do you have any known hearing loss?"
"I love auditions, they're like a first date. I used to always get a recall. But [when they started including that question], it really weirded me out and really threw me.
"I answered truthfully and I signed it, because you have to. I went in [to the audition room] and sang my heart out, but I saw the guy look at the form and whisper to the panel, 'She's deaf,' and I watched all of their faces change.
"That was it – I didn't get a recall. I didn't get a recall again for years."
Lights down on musicals
After years of performing on deaf ears, her mother's words of caution started to ring true.
Belo asked her agent at the time whether the inclusion of the question constituted discrimination — a question that remains unanswered given it's still common practice now, she says.
"It felt personal, like they were saying to me, 'You're not wanted here.'"
For the next few years, Belo only performed in two musicals: a limited run of Mame for Melbourne's The Production Company, and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie for Belvoir St Theatre. Instead, she turned her attention to plays, but it was a difficult patch for the singer-actor.
In 2009, she was touring the country with the now-defunct Blackbird theatre company's production of Steel Magnolias, which included Jacki Weaver, Geraldine Turner and Debra Lawrance among the cast. The show was a resounding success, selling out everywhere it toured.
Then, in the middle of the show's run, she suffered a sudden, severe deterioration in her hearing after a spontaneous motorcycle ride with her then-partner.
"I took my helmet off and all I could hear was robots. Every sound was coming at me all at once and I couldn't filter through anything," Belo recalls.
"I was just sitting there going, 'Oh my God, what has happened?'"
A hospital visit ahead of the evening's performance confirmed that her eardrums had swollen. She was given eardrops and sent her on her way — the show must, of course, go on.
"Luckily, I knew the show back to front. There were only two entrances where the head mechanist had to tap me and say, 'Go!'"
The robotic ringing lasted two to three days before subsiding. Another two years passed before Belo had a similar incident at a neighbour's wedding.
"It was a Greek Serbian wedding, and it was super loud. I woke up with a swollen head, and the robots were back."
This time, the experience lasted 16 weeks.
Belo couldn't work; she couldn't perform and she couldn't teach — and her regular ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist was out of town and unreachable (remarkably, in Antarctica).
"I saw another ENT and they ran tests and said, 'We think you have the hearing of an 85-year-old.'"
Over the next few weeks, multiple medical explanations for her hearing loss were floated, including large vestibular aqueduct (LVA) syndrome, Meniere's disease, and endolymphatic hydrops — both diseases of the inner ear. She was put on an intense course of steroids that stripped the moisture from her bones.
It was an incredibly low point for Belo.
"I was covered in acne, my body was in pain. I was basically just on a couch for weeks thinking, 'Kill me now.'"
The steroids eventually reduced the swelling, but ultimately Belo needed hearing aids.
"I felt like I couldn't be me anymore. I had thought I was doing OK, but suddenly I needed help — and I'm not good at asking for help," she says.
"Especially as a performer, you feel this pressure to be 'perfect', and I just thought, 'How am I going to work?' I didn't know anyone on stage or on TV who was doing it (performing with hearing aids). It didn't exist.
"It felt like I'd failed."
Turning point
As part of adjusting to her hearing aids, Belo also had to relearn how to talk and sing.
"Everyone kept saying to me, 'It's fine, you'll be fine,' but I didn't feel fine," she says.
A laryngoscopy revealed that her epiglottis (the flap at the entrance of your larynx and lungs that folds over your vocal cords to protect them when you swallow food) was folding over every time she tried to sing.
She started seeing a speech therapist and a performance anxiety therapist.
"It took ages but I realised it was about letting go. I still feel like I'm rebuilding that confidence all the time," she says.
At this point, Belo also decided to learn to sign and enrolled in an Australian Sign Language (Auslan) course.
Gradually, she began to embrace and trust her new "deaf voice".
Not long after her hearing aids were fitted, a performer friend encouraged Belo to apply for a masterclass with renowned American acting coach Larry Moss.
Reluctantly, she threw her hat in the ring. It would be the first time she performed to a roomful of her peers with her hearing aids and, while she was incredibly nervous, it marked a turning point.
"He (Moss) did a really beautiful thing for me, which was to introduce me back to the industry. It no longer felt like a negative; this (wearing hearing aids) was now a positive and he inspired me to reframe it," she says.
Moss encouraged Belo to look into staging a production of Tribes, a British play by Nina Raine that had premiered in London two years prior (in 2010) and is about a young deaf boy named Billy who is born into a hearing family.
In the play, Billy meets Sylvia, who is a CODA (a child of a d/Deaf adult), and she teaches him how to sign.
Four years after Moss suggested it, in 2016, Belo staged Tribes at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre, playing the role of Sylvia. It was the first time she signed on stage.
"It changed everything for me."
Next, she tackled musicals.
Although she was still adjusting to the new vibrational quality of her singing voice and rebuilding confidence singing publicly, Belo landed a role in a 2018 production of Lin Manuel Miranda's musical In The Heights at Sydney's Hayes Theatre (it sold out, and booked a return season the following year at Sydney Opera House).
She recalls rehearsing songs with her brother as she regained her confidence.
"I'd ask him, 'What does that sound like?' and he'd say, 'No, do it again,' or 'Yep, that's good.' It was just him — Mum wasn't allowed in."
Belo was nervous to sing in an intimate space like the Hayes, which seats a little more than 100 people.
"It scared the shit out of me. I was really confronted but, strangely, when we got to the Opera House and we were in front of 2,500 people, I actually preferred it."
Once more, Belo had found her feet — and her voice — as a performer.
Since then, she has gone from strength to strength, making her return to commercial musical theatre as "office lush" Margaret in the Dolly Parton musical 9 to 5.
Delayed for two years because of COVID, the show opened in February this year with a principal cast of musical theatre stalwarts including Marina Prior, Casey Donovan, Eddie Perfect and Caroline O'Connor.
Her role in SBS's It's Fine, I'm Fine, playing the stoic psychologist Joanne, is also a high point: her first lead role in a streaming series. The four-part series features eight distinct stories, written by different writers and threaded together by Belo, who co-wrote an episode in Auslan.
A spokesperson for SBS says they are considering commissioning a second season of the AACTA-nominated series, which includes characters from the deaf, disability, LGBTQ+ and Black Pasifika communities, among others.
Belo says: "What I loved about this [series] was that every character was so diverse and so different from the next, but none of them spoke of their diversity or of their disability, and that is so fresh.
"It's the human first, and it's so important that these are real human stories. I think we've got so many more to tell so I hope it keeps going."
Embracing Auslan
When director Stef Smith cast Belo in It's Fine, I'm Fine, she also approached her to be a story producer for the final episode, in which Joanne squabbles with a patient, who turns out to be her lover (spoiler: it's a break-up scene).
The scene is performed in Auslan but it was originally written in English.
"When she (Smith) gave it to me, I said, 'This is very English.' It's written English and had very English ideas and spoken language, so I asked to rewrite it for Auslan," she says.
"I had to take those ideas and re-craft them. There were things that just didn't make sense in Auslan — simple things, like saying someone's name out loud. I wouldn't sign someone's name out if I was speaking to them."
Many people assume that Auslan is a direct translation of English, Belo says. But as with many languages, there are words and phrases that don't quite mirror each other once translated.
"It's like in Portuguese, the word 'saudade'. Everyone thinks it means 'missing', but it's more than that – it's the pain of missing; the emptiness. You can't articulate that in English, and it's the same with Auslan," she says.
The multilingual performer says literally translating a script from English can lead to misnomers.
"Auslan is so three-dimensional … That's the beauty of it — it often encapsulates more than the English words do."
Belo wants to see more Auslan on Australian screens and stages, and more Auslan-interpreted shows.
"My ideal would be for them [Auslan performers] to be somehow incorporated into the show. It'd be great if every theatre had to do it and it wasn't just something they were taking on to tick a box," she says.
Belo has been using Auslan for four years now.
The language has introduced her to the broader d/Deaf community, which has significantly informed her advocacy for accessibility and representation for actors with disability.
Belo is currently working with Deaf playwright and filmmaker Sofya Gollan to develop a toolkit aimed at casting agents, directors and producers working with d/Deaf actors.
"The awareness is there but the education is not. Deafness can be a disability but within the community, it's not necessarily so – it's cultural and linguistic diversity," she says.
"I wish there was more, not just awareness, but education and that's why we're working on the toolkit."
Looking to the year ahead, Belo will be playing Lady Capulet in Bell Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and is also working on several unannounced projects, two of which involve the d/Deaf community.
"I feel really lucky. I know it's not all luck, I've definitely done the work and luck is always preparation meeting opportunity — and I have been prepared — but I'm genuinely chuffed and excited to see what's going to happen next year," she says.
After several challenging years rebuilding her confidence as a performer and rebounding from the setbacks of COVID, Belo says she feels heartened that her persistence is finally paying off.
"For me, success is being respected for what you do and to be trusted, and I very much feel that right now.
"It wasn't all for nothing."
It's Fine, I'm Fine is streaming on SBS On Demand.
