Differentiated Bodies, Dysfluency, Anarchitecture: Disabling Performing Space

Abstract

The article considers how recent work in disability-led theory and theatre practice provokes a radical re-examination of conventional assumptions about disability and the event-space of performance. The article argues that the presence of disabled artists and the development of disability arts culture challenges boundaries and binaries of spatiality and performance. Disability brings an excess to the performer-audience relationship that problematises conventions of aesthetic distance and that emphasises affective, somatic and gestural exchanges as shown in the responses to Felipe Monteiro’s performance O problemo e porque sou lucido?!

The article then draws on how these excess manifests in theatre-making, drawing on the practical experience of working with Different Light Theatre performer Glen Burrows and his deteriorating health conditions and how these blur the lines between the discipline of performance and the need for care and support.

The article then cites Joshua Saint Pierre’s articulation of dysfluency, a term he uses to valorise the perceived errors and missteps in spoken communication of those who stammer and stutter as a critique of the fluency of communicative, and by extension neoliberal, capital (Saint Pierre, 2022). This critique is then compared to Jack Halberstam’s recent thinking on transness, which like Saint Pierre’s thinking on disability, does not merely wish to replicate the boundaries that would render transness a vehicle of capitalism but rather to generate unimagined lives and structures beyond these boundaries and mechanistic economic models.

The article then attempts to relate the somatic and conceptual framings of Monteiro, Saint Pierre and Halberstam to specific examples drawn from the performance practice of Back to Back Theatre and Different Light Theatre in which these theoretical underpinnings appear to be embodied in the practical yet poetic spaces of disability performance. The article concludes that disability-led thinking, culture and practice generates new as yet unimagined possibilities for relationality and relationships.