Contact/disability performance. An essay constructed between Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus

Abstract

This dialogue discusses disability and performance through poetic interrogation, interspersed with segments of Neil Marcus's play My Sexual History. The authors touch on such topics such as sexuality and representation, dance and theatre, the management of disability staring, speech difference and writing, curiosity and shrouding.

Keywords:

• performance
• disability
• dance
• poetry
• My Sexual History
• disability culture
• playscript

Notes

1. How can we honour and claim creative expression by people with speech difference, where that physical, sensorial and expressive difference is not normalised into ‘standard English’, but retains traces of a different form of communicative poetic strategy? A number of theatrical experiments deal with disability and Deaf performances and their multi-lingual frames. In peeling, for instance, Kaite O'Reilly (2002) uses a number of strategies to destabilise spoken language English: she incorporates audio description and English Sign Language, both as performed language and transcribed into spoken English, retaining ESL's grammatical specificities. For many non-ESL spectators and readers, O'Reilly's display of ESL's grammar is most likely the first direct sense they gain of sign language as its own linguistic entity rather than a translation process. Publications such as Signing the Body Poetic (Bauman et al. 2006), which includes ASL (American Sign Language) poetry made accessible for non-ASL speakers via a DVD, further shows the development of differentiated and aesthetically sophisticated strategies for displaying disability and Deaf culture's multiple differences to diverse audiences.

2. Diane P. Freedman and Martha Stoddard Holmes's collection The Teacher's Body (2003) offers material on the strategies disabled teachers use to manage the classroom.

3. This essay also fulfils other functions. It is part of a reclamation of our artistic history, that is, disability culture's history. It showcases material conventionally seen as outside the canon of dramatic literature. Vicki Lewis's anthology Beyond Victims and Villains (2006) or material published around Graeae productions, such as Kaite O'Reilly's peeling, are part of a growing wave of disability culture work that becomes accessible to the mainstream. These materials also witness the languages, aesthetics and breadth of disability culture. But there is much more material to access and display, and in particular, material that does not follow non-disabled visions of theatre.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is a community performance artist, a disability culture activist, a wheelchair dancer and Associate Professor of English, Theatre and Dance and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Her books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge(2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art(2007) and Community Performance: An Introduction(2007). She's the artistic director of The Olimpias (www.olimpias.org)

Neil Marcus

Neil Marcus: actor, poet, writer, butoh dancer, contact improvisational lover. Berkeley citizen who works with this key idea: disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity, disability is an art