By Kenny Sokan, News Correspondent

Cheers and laughter along with oohs and aahs filled Blackman Auditorium on Friday night as Northeastern kicked off its 16th annual, three-day ASL (American Sign Language) Festival.

The event began with the Marie Jean Philip ASL Poetry, Storytelling and Deaf Art Competition with more performances at night. The competition portion of the festival is in honor of Marie Jean Philip, an internationally-known advocate for ASL and deaf culture who also taught at Northeastern decades ago.

“It’s a nice opportunity for everybody to get together to see some really talented deaf people and deaf kids, and just basically have a good time,” Dennis Cokely, director of Northeastern’s ASL program and chair of the Modern Languages Department, said. More than 100 students from 16 schools throughout the US and Canada participated in this year’s event.

The poetry, stories and art were all dedicated in honor of historic deaf figures and deaf culture, Christopher Tester, the master of ceremonies, said.

One part of the Friday festivities was “iSkit,” performances by students from The Learning Center for the Deaf (TLC), the Austine School for the Deaf, and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The objective was to incorporate four items into each act: a ticket, a tube, a DVD and an ASL book.

The TLC students developed a skit about an invisible time-traveling aircraft used to travel back to the year 1817 to meet Laurent Clerc, one of the men who founded the first deaf school in America. The students then traveled to the year 2217, discovering a society with robots called “iDeaf” that could sign.

Students from the Austine School in Vermont performed three skits, including an adaption of the “Three Stooges” and a performance of signing and dancing to the Owl City song “Fireflies.” Students from the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Allston performed magic tricks and answered questions.

When asked through an interpreter about being nervous on stage, one young boy, Mohamed Abanoor, said, “I felt awesome. I was excited, I felt motivated. I had a lot of fun.”

Three TLC high school students, Sara Goulart, Ashley Kingston and Colin Lualdi, gave a presentation about a trip they will take to China next month as a part of a traveling abroad program for the school.

“I’m fascinated with political and international relations, the media. So I’m often reading about China myself personally,” Lualdi said through an interpreter. “I love the deaf community advocacy aspect of it. It’s a great opportunity too because I can see China myself, the country, at the same time get to meet the international deaf community and that’s awesome.”

After an intermission, Doug Ridloff, a self-titled ASL artist, actor, curator, educator and filmmaker, and Matthew “Magic” Morgan, an internationally-known deaf magician, both performed.

Cokely said the ASL festival attracts about 600 to 800 people annually.

The festival “provides opportunities, more and more, that are not available in the deaf community,” he said. “It [also] does a lot for Northeastern’s reputation.”