Emptiness as material for devised theatre performance

ABSTRACT

The article examines the ways in which failure operated in the devising process with a colleague with learning disabilities. Themes of collaboration, co-creativity and power relations are set within the account of a process between the author and a research participant with learning and physical disabilities. The postdramatic device of failure within theatrical performance is set against the predicament that a person with learning disabilities faced as he hoped to ‘pass’ as non-disabled and as he attempted to make a statement about himself by appearing in his self-authored piece of theatre and discovered that he might fail at this task. The article tracks the process via different theoretical lenses, from linguistics to trauma and theatre and concludes by finding that knowledge of social constructions of learning disability as ineluctable, and understanding the instability of disability, cannot erase the material reality and effects of disability. Instead, the article considers how these effects were incorporated and became the material for theatrical performance. The author concludes that the collaborative relationship between authors with learning disabilities and facilitators/dramaturgs without learning disabilities exposes both positions to their own vulnerabilities, assumptions and needs. How the relationships are navigated is therefore of crucial importance.

KEYWORDS:

• Devised theatre
• learning disability
• trauma

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to members of The Hemispheric Institute Encuentro Performance and Disability Working Group who convened at the 1Xth Encuentro in Concordia University Montreal in 2014, for their invaluable comments and support of an early version of this essay. Also thanks to my colleague Andrew Filmer for his sharp-eyed critique and generous advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Margaret Ames is a Senior Lecturer at Aberystwyth University. She is interested in how live performance work created by people with learning disabilities might contribute to mainstream theatre and how it reveals embodied expert knowledge about the location and cultural specificity.

Notes

1 A basic and cursory search of Disability Arts Online: http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/home currently has 32 records of performing groups for people with learning disabilities. Ten further examples are listed on the Foundation for Community Dance's website: http://www.communitydance.org.uk/. Other opportunities for performing practices are found via Arts Agencies and projects throughout the UK.

2 For the most part of this article, the term learning disability is used as it is the most commonly used term to describe people who have been diagnosed as requiring significant levels of support in the UK. Intellectual disability is the term most commonly used in the USA, Australia and this term is growing in its use in English speaking countries. In discussion with the member of Cyrff Ystwyth, the author was told by colleagues at that time that they did not like the term intellectual disability as it suggests a lack of ability to think. Those who understood the labels assigned to them favoured learning disability as it suggested more of the particular problems they face in daily life.

3 For example, see Ames (2011, 2012, 2015).

4 Further examples include Heart N Soul and Mind the Gap in the UK and Back to Back Theatre in Australia. There are many other theatre and dance companies across the world whose work is generated by people with learning disabilities through varying techniques and aesthetic foci.

5  For an example of this argument, see Corely and Stewart (2008).

6 For a discussion on status and personhood or full moral status (FMS) and disability, see Purcell (2016). Purcell considers how the capacity to narrate ‘indicates that one has full moral standing’. She offers this capacity as a threshold concept that denotes, without gradation FMS. This may be achieved in collaboration with others and is not necessarily an individual capacity but is also co-authored via relational experiences with others, objects and environments. She states: ‘My insight is to shift our understanding of a sophisticated cognitive capacity away from an intellectual ability and focus on a social ability’ (13). Anita Silvers also discusses FMS but takes this concept to be dangerous for people with learning disabilities. She proposes legal personhood as an essential status that does not depend on unreliable accounts of a person's mental capacity. Opposing the concept of Moral Status, Legal personhood affords rights and liberty. Becoming ‘full subjects of justice’ (2012, 1022) can be made possible via collaboration and ‘interpersonal prosthetic cognitive processes’ (2012, 1022). Explanation of cognitive processes is in Silvers and Francis (2009).