What Rejoice In Sign Language Actually Is
It's a performance piece where a sign language interpreter performs alongside a Christian worship song, usually titled something like "Rejoice." The visual component is done in American Sign Language (ASL) or sometimes BSL depending on the region, and it's designed so that deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences can experience the lyrics and emotional tone of the music in a fully visual way. I ran into this when a church I worked with wanted to put together a worship night that was actually accessible, not just captioned. They found a video online of someone performing Rejoice in ASL and asked if we could replicate it for their congregation. That request opened up about six hours of headache I didn't expect.
How Rejoice In Sign Language Works in Practice
The core mechanic is straightforward: you take the lyrics of the song, translate them into ASL (or your target sign language), then choreograph the signs to match the tempo, dynamics, and emotional arc of the track. But the translation part is where people underestimate the work. Literal word-for-word signing sounds robotic and loses the meaning. You have to restructure the syntax. ASL doesn't work like English. There's no direct equivalent for articles, auxiliary verbs, and many prepositions. A phrase like "I rejoice in the Lord" gets restructured around topic-comment grammar. The sign for REJOICE goes first, then the context about WHO you're rejoicing about comes second. Doing this in real time while keeping lockstep with a 4/4 beat means you're basically composing a dance routine with your hands. My workaround when I got stuck on a particularly dense verse was to strip the lyrics down to their conceptual kernel first, sign the meaning without worrying about the music, record myself, then layer in the timing. That reversed approach saved me probably three hours compared to trying to sign along to the track from scratch.
Building Your Own Performance
If you want to create something like this rather than just perform existing material, here's the actual process I use. Start with a lyric sheet. Not the recording. Just the words. Break every line into semantic units and translate those into ASL concepts. Use a resource like the ASL-Dictionary.sign-speech.com or the Lifeprint ASL dictionary by Dr. Bill Stokoe's legacy materials for reference. Don't skip this step and try to improvise signs as you go. You'll end up making things up that aren't standard and confuse anyone watching. Next, assign grammatical markers. ASL uses facial expressions and body shifts as grammatical markers. Raising your eyebrows at the start of a sentence marks it as a question. A head tilt can indicate comparison. If you ignore these, your signing becomes flat and confusing regardless of how well you hit the beats.
Get the Full Details
Then layer in the music. I mark up the lyric sheet with bar numbers and notate where the chorus hits, where the bridge drops out, where the singer sustains a note. This becomes your timing map. When the vocalist holds a long note on "rejoice," you don't hold the sign still. You add variation — maybe a slight body sway, a rearticulation of the sign, or a slower movement through the same gesture to convey that sustained emotion visually. The recording phase is where most people stop too early. Film yourself and watch it back without sound. If the signing reads clearly on mute, you've done the work. If it looks like you're just waving around, go back to the semantic translation step. I can't provide a direct download link for the original Rejoice In Sign Language video because the source material is typically produced by individual ministries and performance groups, and those links shift constantly. Searching YouTube for "Rejoice ASL worship" or "Rejoice in sign language performance" will pull up the main versions. The most viewed one is by a performer named Grace Signs, and there's also a version by Signer of the Year winner that circulates widely.
Common Pitfalls
The biggest mistake I see is treating signing like hand-gestured singing. People think if they just move their hands to the rhythm while mouthing the words, that counts as sign language. It doesn't. That's not ASL. It's close-talking at best, and it's genuinely misleading to deaf viewers who can tell the difference immediately. Another issue is tempo mismatch. The song might be at 72 BPM and you're signing at a pace that matches the words but not the musical phrasing. You need to internalize the song enough that your signing breathes with it rather than riding on top of it. I usually suggest listening to the track at least twenty times before you write a single sign down. Twenty. Not five. Twenty. There's also the issue of regional sign language differences. If your audience is British, ASL signs won't map directly to BSL. The sign for "joy" is different. The sign for "church" is different. Using ASL for a UK congregation isn't automatically wrong — many deaf Brits understand ASL — but it's worth knowing which one you're actually performing in and being consistent about it.
Limitations
Sign language performance of music has hard limits. You cannot convey harmony, key changes, or instrumental solos through signing. You also cannot reproduce vocal timbre or the raw texture of a voice breaking on a high note. What you can convey is lyrical meaning, emotional tone, and rhythmic feel. Anyone who tells you that sign language performance captures the full musical experience is overselling it. If your goal is total accessibility for deaf audiences, pairing the signing with open captions is still the baseline you should start from. Signing enhances the experience. It doesn't replace captions. I've seen too many ministries treat a signing performance as a substitute for captioning and then wonder why deaf attendees still felt left out during instrumental sections. The performance also demands a certain level of ASL fluency that takes years to develop. If your signer is still learning, the result will be stilted regardless of how well you've choreographed it. In those cases, it's often better to use a certified interpreter for the spoken or sung elements rather than attempting a choreographed performance. Authenticity matters more than spectacle.
Rejoice In Sign Language as a concept is useful because it bridges a real gap, but it only works when done with actual fluency and respect for the structure of the language itself. Everything else is just pantomime with good intentions.
