[This abstract focuses on The Disability Project through its construction as community-based theatre]

Joan Lipkin, That Uppity Theatre Company
Ann Fox, Davidson College

“No performance by itself can alter the routines of everyday life, but community-based theatre can provide ‘what if’ images of potential community, sparking the kind of imaginative work that must precede substantial changes in customary habits.” --Bruce McConachie

Recent discussions about the nature of community-based performance, while suggesting the elusive meaning of “community,” have nonetheless underscored the efficacy of grassroots theatre in challenging traditional perceptions while promoting movement toward egalitarianism.  Progress may be based in creating temporary imaginative communites of the kind Sonja Kuftinec describes relative to her work with adolescents in Bosnia, or fraught with the ambiguities and limitations that Bruce McConachie encountered in his work with a grassroots theatre project on race relations in Williamsburg.  Nevertheless, with the increasing absence of a tangible sense of community in everyday life, grassroots theatre cuts across lines of gender, sexuality, race, and class to re-establish such links.

What significance can theorizing community-based theatre take on relative to disability?  Our article details the history and methodology of one such grassroots theatre, The Disability Project, centered around the culture of disability in St. Louis.  Community-based theatre has traditionally considered the boundaries that create and divide communities to be situated along lines of gender, race, class or economics.  To use disability culture as the focal point of community-based theatre is to do more than simply add “ability” to a list of ways in which we configure community, positioning the disabled as outsiders who should be mainstreamed or integrated into a pre-existing, “normal” community.  The Disability Project uses the strategies of grassroots theatre to show disability culture as an already extant and rich community. 

Those audience members who might be more comfortable seeing their culture—whether “normal” or disabled--as a separate and distinct entity find such inclinations called into question.  Disability troubles traditional boundaries, real or imagined, between segments of a community.  It provides a link of commonality between all viewers and performers; we all exist in bodies that have been, are, or are on their way to being disabled, by virtue of temporary or permanent injuries or illnesses as well as the aging process.  And because disability manifests itself in many different ways, its own boundaries are fluid. 

The presence and range of performers with and without disabilities in The Disability Project, then, suggests the diverse needs and identities that exist across communities that seem “set.”  Likewise, The Disability Project uses a mix of presentational strategies that at once ground the audience in the familiar and challenge them to see beyond it.  Monologues in which performers recount experiences from their lives with a disability are based in familiar traditions of storytelling.  At the same time, moments in which the play eschews narrative in favor of more nonrealistic representations of disability challenge a viewer to re-experience their understanding of disability culture.  The disability experience cannot be reduced to one method of representation; intervening into expectations about what normalcy and ability are through variegated narratives, sound, and movement creates an innovative way into that experience, and causes delight in the viewer by virtue of its freshness. 

The process, of course, is not perfect, and there are several difficulties we have already encountered that we shall address as we bring our paper to a close.  What happens when the needs and beliefs of performers linked to the other communities in which they belong create dissonance within the group?  For example, one participant in the Project voiced a concern that the overt inclusion of homosexuality in the work might somehow take away from the priority of disability concerns.  Similarly, gender issues within the group have caused some discomfort.  What about when the needs of different performers with disabilities are at odds? For example, does the emotional discomfort of a newly-disabled performer mean we avoid sharing the stories and experiences of other performers who may be more adapted to living as persons with a disability?   What about the different needs of performers according to their specific type disability?  To what degree does the danger still persist that some audience members, well schooled in viewing disability according to medical or moral models, will read the stage picture through the lens of sentimentality rather than empathy?  Does the integration of performers with and without disabilities subtly valorize the very picture of “mainstreaming” we are trying to resist?  How do we model our ideal community within a city that is severely limited in the range of performance venues with the kind and amount of accessible space in which we need to perform? 

Candlelight Vigil in Memory of Lisi Bansen: Thursday, November 2, 2006 at 6PM 2600 Block of Delmar (btw Jefferson & Beaumont)

"Working"



Channel surfing during the workday, employees will have the chance to watch their favorite television characters, past and present, tackle the tough topic of disability issues in the workplace.  From a lost episode of the “Brady Bunch” in which JAN finally outshines her more notable sibling, Marcia, by advocating for people with disabilities everywhere to the more contemporary “Survivor” and its tribal conflict, audiences are provided an innovative approach to raising the issues of disability etiquette, workplace accommodations, disability facts and figures, and so much more.

Allison and Sammy are profiled in the Northwest County Journal

Click here to see Stu and Diane's Wedding Album.

Mission
The Project endeavors to empower individuals, honor their stories, imaginations, foster community and enhance public awareness about disability through innovative theatre of the highest quality.

An ensemble engaging in conversation, writing, 
sound, movement and theatrical exercises 
to develop and perform material 
around the culture of disability.

Media
director@uppityco.com
4466 West Pine Blvd.
Suite 13C
St. Louis, Missouri 63108
United States of America
Phone: 314.995.4600
Fax: 314.534.6591

That Uppity
Theatre Company
Sponsor of
The DisAbility Project.
Find out more
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