Disability And Performance

"A testament to the synergy of two evolving fields. From the study of staged performances to examinations of the performing body in everyday life, this book demonstrates the enormous profitability of moving beyond disability as metaphor. . . . It's a lesson that many of our cultural institutions desperately need to learn." -Martin F. Norden, University of Massachusetts-Amherst This groundbreaking collection imagines disabled bodies as "bodies in commotion"-bodies that dance across artistic and discursive boundaries, challenging our understanding of both disability and performance. In the book's essays, leading critics and artists explore topics that range from theater and dance to multi-media performance art, agit-prop, American Sign Language theater, and wheelchair sports. Bodies in Commotion is the first collection to consider the mutually interpretive qualities of these two emerging fields, producing a dynamic new resource for artists, activists, and scholars.

Disability and Music Performance examines discriminatory social practices in music conservatoria, orchestras, music festivals and music competitions, which limit disabled people’s access to music performance at a professional level. Of particular interest are the disabling barriers that musicians with an intellectual, physical, sensory or neurological disability—or an acquired brain injury—encounter in the world of Western classical music, both as students and as professional performers. This book collects data in the form of semi-structured interviews and video and audio recordings to explore the voice, concerns and suggestions expressed by musicians with disabilities. It examines their perceptions of both inclusive and discriminatory practices in music institutions as well as the representation of, and audio-visual recordings by, key musical figures with disabilities. Its findings aim to contribute to the wellbeing of musicians with impairments by challenging disabling social practices that see them as inferior. This publication offers performers, teachers and researchers new perspectives for exploring some of the most common social dynamics in encounters between normative audiences, musicians and music critics, and musicians with disabilities. It invites the reader to recognise disability as a rightful identity category in music performance and to dismantle the disabling barriers that limit the participation of disabled people in music-making.

In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.

Performances in hospices and on beaches; cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the US; communal poetry among mental health system survivors: this book, now in paperback, presents a senior practitioner/critic's exploration of arts-based research processes sustained over more than a decade - a subtle engagement with disability culture.

As the profile of disability sport has risen, so has the emphasis grown beyond participation to include the development of a high performance environment. This book is the first to take an in-depth look at the role of coaches and coaching in facilitating the professionalisation of disability sport, in raising performance standards, and as an important vector for the implementation of significant political, socio-cultural and technological change. Using in-depth case studies of elite disability sport coaches from around the world, the book offers a framework for critical reflection on coaching practice as well as the reader’s own experiences of disability sport. The book also evaluates the vital role of the coach in raising the bar of performance in a variety of elite level disability sports, including athletics, basketball, boccia, equestrian sport, rowing, soccer, skiing, swimming and volleyball. Providing a valuable evidence-based learning resource to support coaches and students in developing their own practice, High Performance Disability Sport Coaching is essential reading for all those interested in disability sport, coaching practice, elite sport development and the Paralympic Games.

Interdependent Magic: Disability Performance in Canada is a collection of plays and interviews by, for, and about Disabled theatre artists that invites readers into the magical worlds of Disability arts culture. The book features four plays as well as interviews with artists Justin Manyfingers and Niall McNeill. In Smudge by Alex Bulmer, a woman details her journey toward Blindness, mourning what she loses and discovering what her other senses provide. Access Me by Boys in Chairs Collective is a celebration of sex and Disability, providing an all-access safe space to spin around. Antarctica by Syrus Marcus Ware imagines a world where racialized people have survived multiple catastrophes and must begin terraforming a new colony. And in Deafy by Chris Dodd, a Deaf public speaker takes the audience on an unexpected journey of discovering what it really means to belong.

This collection brings together scholarship and creative writing that brings together two of the most innovative fields to emerge from critical and cultural studies in the past few decades: Disability studies and performance studies. It draws on writings about such media as live performance art, photography, silent film, dance, personal narrative and theatre, using such diverse perspectives and methods as queer theory, gender, feminist, and masculinity studies, dance studies, as well as providing first publication of creative writings by award-winning poets and playwrights. This book was based on a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly.