Same Difference?: Disability, Presence, Performance and Ethics

Abstract

The meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances — acts in which social performers and social spectators play, improvise or ‘riff off socially scripted parts. In Western culture, the daily social drama of disability has historically cast the disabled body as a source of fear, deficiency or pity. The artists discussed throughout this book seek, via subversive repetition of the stories, roles and scenography that underpin daily and dramatic performances of disability, to destabilize stereotypes from within. They do this in productively live spaces and places, sometimes in theatres, galleries or installation spaces in which the fourth wall no longer exists, and sometimes in the very public streets, shopping malls or social media in which the stereotypes circulate. Although Cunningham, Lakmaier, Jones, Shannon, Ara niello, Williamson, Crow and the other artists considered here create very different types of performances, they do seem to deploy some distinctive performance strategies. They play out a more or less exaggerated, abstracted or absurd image of the role society assigns them in public spaces or places. In doing so, they prompt spectators-as-performers to replay their own socially assigned role in response. They use commentary, counter-position or other devices — characters, staging, proliferation of shifting perspectives or calls for specific sorts of spectatorial responses — to position their performance as a reality, and a representation of something more than its own reality, at once.