Interrogating wholeness through access aesthetics: Kaite O’Reilly’s In Water I’m Weightless

ABSTRACT

Commissioned for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Kaite O’Reilly’s play In Water I’m Weightless uses access aesthetics as well as content to interrogate the relationship between wholeness and disability. Featuring an entirely d/Deaf and disabled cast, the play provides a multitude of ways through which the performance can be accessed. Through its form and content, this paper argues, In Water I’m Weightless challenges the idea that a piece of theatre must be consumed and understood as a whole and breaks up hierarchies that dictate how a play is to be accessed and privilege the nondisabled body in the theatre.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability arts
• access aesthetics
• disabled theatre
• disability
• unlimited

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Nina Muehlemann completed her PhD at King’s College London in 2018. Her research examines disabled artists’ engagement with the ‘Superhuman’ narrative in the context of the London 2012 Paralympics. She has published a review in Contemporary Theatre Review and presented at various conferences. She writes for Disability Arts Online.

Notes

1. According to convention in the field, I use d/Deaf to describe both people who use capital D ‘Deaf’ to indicate their cultural identity tied to the use of sign language, and those who use a lower case d ‘deaf’ to describe their auditory status.

2. The main ad of this campaign can be found through the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuAPPeRg3Nw.

3. Liz Crow highlights how jarring this celebration of ‘overcomers’ feels in a climate of austerity and welfare cuts, but also asserts how this polarised media coverage that pits overcomers against scroungers serves neoliberalism, as ‘both images tell a similar story: of individuals with impairments separate from social context. Whether by Paralympic success or claimant immorality, the individual is portrayed as soaring or plummeting through innate will’ (2015, 4).

4. Petra Kuppers describes ‘performance as means that can be used to break out of allocated spaces’ by disabled artists (2003, 1).

5. Email conversation with O’Reilly in 2016.

6. For further discussion about the way disability fits into Butler’s framework of precarity, see also Knight (2013, 22).