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Abstract
Drawing attention to the affordances and challenges of disability dance and choreography, most notably aesthetic ideals which are antithetical to disability knowing, this research seeks to instigate a discussion on how we might radically envisage disability dance through a crip aesthetics. Theorizing my crip choreographic work Colored Shadow, I offer a method of leakiness as a tool to rupture hegemonic aesthetics of dance, which include compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, hierarchies of the stage, and inaccessibility. My proposal of a leaky choreographic method offers insight into the significance of crip theory and crip methodology as paths toward reconsidering and redefining aesthetics.
Acknowledgements
This research is indebted to scholars and artists Nicola Conibere, Jens R. Giersdorf, Kayla Hamilton, Alexandra Kolb, Petra Kuppers, Cory Nakasue, and Movement Research, who have been significantly contributive to my disability dance scholarship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Petra Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5.
2 “Americans with Disabilities Act,” US Department of Justice - Civil Rights Division, accessed November 4, 2021, https://www.ada.gov/.
3 Carrie Sandahl, “QUEERING THE CRIP OR CRIPPING THE QUEER: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9 no. 1–2 (2003): 25–56, Project MUSE; Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013).
4 Sandahl, “QUEERING THE CRIP,” 38; McRuer, Crip Theory, 31; Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 15.
5 Emily Watlington, “Cripping Choreography,” Art in America, March 9, 2021, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/disability-dance-1234586026/.
6 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies and Choreographers,” in Worlding Dance, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 98.
7 Kélina Gotman, Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3.
8 Lizz Schumer, “How to Disclose a Disability to Your Employer (And Whether You Should),” New York Times, July 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/smarter-living/disclose-disability-work-employer-rights.html.
9 Tito Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2014), 21.
10 Online Etymology Dictionary, s,v. “cripple (n.),” accessed October 13, 2021, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cripple.
11 Talila A. Lewis, “A Working Definition of Ableism,” Talila A. Lewis (blog), https://www.talilalewis.com/blog.
12 Lewis, “A Working Definition of Ableism.”
13 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), 15-21; Shayda Kafai, Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021), 22-24.
14 Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 98-99.
15 Louise Hickman and David Serlin, “Towards a crip methodology for critical disability studies,” in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability Studies: Looking Towards the Future, Vol. 2, eds. Katie Ellis, Rosemarie Galrland-Thomson, Mike Kent, and Rachel Robertson (London: Routledge, 2018), 133.
16 Hickman and Serlin, “Towards a crip methodology,” 135.
17 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “leak (v.),” accessed March 3, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/leak.
18 Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011) 47-49.
19 Adam Benjamin, Making an Entrance: Theory and Practice for Disabled and Non-Disabled Dancers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40.
20 Umberto Eco, On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea (London, MacLehose Press, 2010), 135.
21 Eco, On Beauty, 72-75.
22 Eco, On Beauty, 56.
23 Ann Cooper Albright, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 57-58; Adam Benjamin, Making an Entrance: Theory and Practice for Disabled and Non-Disabled Dancers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40; Owen Smith, “Shifting Apollo’s Frame: Challenging the Body Aesthetic in Theater Dance” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, eds. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 75.
24 “Our Mission and History,” The Joyce Theater, accessed December 6, 2022, https://www.joyce.org/about/our-mission-and-history.
25 Sarah Whatley, “Dance and disability: the dancer, the viewer and the presumption of difference” Research in Dance Education 8, no. 1 (2007): 5-25; Susan Baglieri and Arthur Shapiro, Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom: Critical Practices for Embracing Diversity in Education (New York: Routledge, 2012): 3-16, 85-102.
26 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 1.
27 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 3, 9.
28 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 2-4.
29 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics 5-9.
30 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics 5-9.
31 Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies: Introduction,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8.2 (2014): 127-147.
32 Owen Smith, “Shifting Apollo’s Frame: Challenging the Body Aesthetic in Theater Dance” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, eds. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 73-74.
33 Smith, “Shifting Apollo’s Frame,” 76.
34 Alison Kopit, “Toward a Queer Crip Aesthetic: Dance, Performance, and the Disabled Bodymind” (master’s thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2017), 28-29, https://hdl.handle.net/10027/21864.
35 Matthew Reason, “Ways of Watching: Five aesthetics of learning disability theatre” in The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media, eds. Bree Hadley, and Donna McDonald (New York: Routledge, 2019), 165.
36 Reason, “Ways of Watching,” 165-166.
37 Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 13.
38 Benjamin, Making an Entrance, 26.
39 Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance, 58-59; Sandahl, “QUEERING THE CRIP,” 30-31.
40 Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance, 4-5.
41 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 11.
42 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 39-40.
43 Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 337-338; Fiona Wilke, “Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-specific Performance in Britain,” New Theatre Quarterly (2002), 150.
44 Megan Johnson, “Sounding a Crip Aesthetic: Transforming the Sonic in Samuel Beckett’s Not I,” Performance Matters 6, no.2 (2020): 68, https://doi.org/10.7202/1075801ar.
45 Sandahl, “QUEERING THE CRIP,” 27.
46 Johnson, “Sounding a Crip Aesthetic,” 71.
47 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “power (n.),” accessed December 3, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power.
48 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 26-27; Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017): 1.
49 Linton, Claiming Disability, 11-12; Mia Mingus, “Medical Industrial Complex Visual,” Leaving Evidence (blog), February 6, 2015, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/medical-industrial-complex-visual/; Withers, Disability Politics & Theory, 34-35, 41-42.
50 Johnson, “Sounding a Crip Aesthetic,” 73.
51 Sandahl, “QUEERING THE CRIP,” 30.
*While not mutually exclusive, some disabled individuals capitalize “d” in “Disabled” when self-identifying to signal the shared culture, politics, and history of disabled people, and some do not feel they have access to, wish to disclose, or work with/through a political identity of disability. Many of the disability culture spaces I engage with refrain from capitalization because the category of disability is contingent.
*Leakiness as a metaphor and method for choreographic practice is informed by the research of philosophy and aesthetics scholar Erin Manning (specifically her chapter “Toward a Leaky Sense of Self”) and feminist and critical disability studies scholar Margrit Shildrick. See Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham and London, US: Duke University Press, 2013), 2-15; Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism, and (bio)ethics (London and New York, Routledge, 1997).
*The ten principles of Disability Justice include intersectionality, leadership of those most impacted, anti-capitalist politic, cross-movement solidarity, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, commitment to cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation. See Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer. Available from https://www.sinsinvalid.org/.
*Protactile is a language created by DeafBlind people in the US using tactile communication. Rather than rely on visual or audible information, Protactile is practiced on the body through touch.
† Haptic technology, or haptics refers to the transmission of information through touch, often through what are known as ‘wearables’ which create tactile sensations and vibrations on the body.
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Elisabeth Motley
ELISABETH MOTLEY (she/her) is a disabled, neurodivergent, and mad choreographer and scholar whose work examines disability as a framework for choreography and pedagogy. She is an Associate Professor of Dance at Marymount Manhattan College (NYC) and a PhD candidate at University of Roehampton (UK), focusing on choreography and disability culture studies. Motley was a 2019-2021 Movement Research Artist in Residence and the recipient of a 2018 Fulbright US-UK Scholar Award. She has received grants from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts.