Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge

190 Pages·2003·36.472 MB·English

by  Petra Kuppers

Disability and Contemporary
Performance
Disability and Contemporary Performance explores the relationship between
contemporary performance practice and disability, and investigates the ways in
which disabled performers challenge, change and work with existing stereotypes
through their work. Encompassing the fields of performance, cultural and disability
studies, Petra Kuppers draws on the insights developed by theorists such as
Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and De leuze to question the assumptions of tragedy and
loss that are traditionally associated with the disabled person and to suggest new
understandings of disability and identity politics. She draws on numerous examples
of individual performers and groups from the UK, North America and Europe who
constantly challenge stereotypes through the media of live and installation art,
theater, dance and photography, including Mat Fraser, Jo Spence, CandoCo and
L'Oiseau Mouche, and opens up new and lively perspectives on contemporary
performance practice, identity politics and cultural conceptions of disability.
Petra Kuppers is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant College.
She is Artistic Director of the Olimpias Performance Research Projects and she
has written extensively in the fields of cultural, performance and disability studies.

Disability and Contemporary
Performance
Bodies on Edge
Petra Kuppers
~~ ~~o~~!~n~~:up
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First published 2003
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXI4 4RN
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Reprinted 2005
Transferred to Digital Printing 2005
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2004 Petra Kuppers
Typeset in Goudy by
Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kuppers, Petra.
Disability and contemporary performance : bodies on edge I
Petra Kuppers.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
(hardback: alk. paper)
I. Sociology of disability. 2. People with disabilities and the performing
arts. 3. Artists with disabilities. 4. Arts and society. 5. Arts - Political
aspects. 6. Social problems in art. I. Title.
HV 1568 .K87 2004 20030 I 0 I 08
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-415-30238-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-30239-0 (pbk)
Contents
List of figures vii
Acknowledgements ix
Figure acknowledgements xi
Performance and disability: An introduction 1
1 Practices of reading difference 12
2 Freaks, stages, and medical theaters 31
3 Deconstructing images: Performing disability 49
4 Outsider energies 70
5 Encountering paralysis: Disability, trauma, and narrative 87
6 New technologies of embodiment: Cyborgs and websurfers 105
Epilog: Toward the unknown body: Stillness, silence,
and space in mental health settings 122
Notes 135
Bibliography 156
Index 171

Figures
1 Jo Spence (in collaboration with Tim Sheard): Exiled, from
Narratives of Dis~ease. 18
2 Mat Fraser as Sealo 3 2
3 Publicity card for 'Sealboy: Freak' 35
4 Andre Brouillet (1887), Une Leqon Clinique ala Salpetriere,
showing Charcot demonstrating on Blanche Wittmann 41
5 Elisabeth Loffler in Einblicke 60
6 Bill Shannon, publicity still 63
7 David Toole in Outside In 66
8 Compagnie de L'Oiseau~ Mouche, Le Labyrinthe 74
9 Martina Nitz, in Sensation of Motion in Time 81
10 Body Distance Between the Minds: Gerda Konig and
Marc Stuhlmann 84
11 Celeste Dandeker and Margaret Williams, director of Outside In 93
12 Contact 17/GoAccess publicity postcard 112
13 Navigating the Body (web~capture), Susan Harman 118
14 Traces, video~still 133

Acknowledgements
Many people have helped this book's journey. It has been a most pleasurable
journey, allowing me to marvel at the ingenuity, the creativity and the richness
of politically challenging and exciting art, and to immerse myself in the different
but related pleasures of critical thinking.
I would like to thank Rosie Waters, T alia Rodgers and Diane Parker at Routledge
for commissioning and publishing this book. Penny Florence at Falmouth College
of Art has been a challenging and nourishing reader of many of the initial
ideas which developed into these chapters here, and the feminist research group
she led was my most important academic home. The late Anna Marie Taylor
at the University of Wales, Swansea, made a lot of the thinking in this book
possible by supporting my community art practice, and I want to remember her
for her vision and her commitment to arts for social change.
A fellowship at the Contemporary Arts Department at Manchester Metropolitan
University allowed me to develop my thoughts, and I want to thank my colleagues
there. I also would like to thank Liz Goodman and Franc Chamberlain, who
urged me to edit a special double edition of The Contemporary Theater Review on
performance and disability. It was during this time that I met many of the artists
and theorists whose work is discussed in these pages.
I continue to thrive in the intellectual support of the Pembroke Center
for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and I want to thank
director Elizabeth Weed, and seminar leaders Mary Ann Doane and Anne
Fausto-Sterling for allowing me to participate as a Visiting Scholar, as well as the
community of scholars who welcomed me there.
The actual labor of assembling this book has been made possible by the collegial
atmosphere at my home institution, Bryant College, and I want to express my
thanks to the members of the English and Cultural Studies Department, as well
as to others on this interdisciplinary campus who have been friends and discussion
partners. Many, many students have been my helpers in developing these thoughts,
and I want to mention in particular the group of undergraduates with whom
I embarked on the 2002 Medical Vision/Medical Performances course at Bryant
College, as well as the PhD students whose work set me thinking in ever new
directions, in particular Anna Fenemore and Maria Walsh.