[This abstract focuses on The Disability Project through its construction as feminist theatre]

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

The Disability Project is a series of weekly workshops that engage conversation, writing, sound and movement, and theatrical exercises, to explore developing material around the culture of disability.  Founded and directed by Joan Lipkin, artistic director of That Uppity Theatre Company, the Project has been underway since 1996, and is collaborating toward creating a large-scale, multi-disciplinary piece to be produced for the entire St. Louis community in the fall of 2000.

The trajectory of Lipkin’s playwriting has mirrored the evolution of feminist theatricality, as she moved from the comic, in-your-face satire of early political musicals such as He’s Having Her Baby, to more nuanced interrogations of representation, identity, and gender, as in Small Domestic Acts.  In the latter, Lipkin rejects the claims to objectivity made by mimetic theatre.  The play’s multiple perspectives, reflections on the impossibility of objectivity, and interruptions of a realist narrative through addressing the audience result in a work aligned with the materialist feminist approaches defined by theorists such as Jill Dolan and Sue-Ellen Case.  Lipkin interrogates socially constructed categories such as class, gender, and sexuality typically regarded as cohesive and natural.   What, then, are we to make when disability is added to this list?  What happens when the work of a feminist playwright and director intersects with an emergent disability studies movement, as it does in Lipkin’s most recent work, The Disability Project? 

Since they challenge identities assumed to be whole or natural, many of the materialist feminist theatrical strategies influenced by poststructuralism can be used in concert with the presentation of disability culture. With its emphasis on deconstructing normalcy, disability studies shares the disposition of feminist practitioners of theatre such as Lipkin to embrace a fragmentation in stylistics and approach that confounds more traditional audience expectations and viewing habits. 

The Disability Project has used such strategies in a number of ways, as detailed in our study.  For example, the workshop resists privileging only the author’s view; the performance is multiperspectival, workshopped and constructed in concert with the performers and guest artists.  Movement within the piece is used in a way that interrogates what some audience members might expect to see as a “normal” range of motion, thus troubling idealized constructions of beauty and movement.  As a result, the one-way direction of the gaze is disrupted; the audience is not only alienated from how they usually might regard bodies, but also made highly conscious of the act of looking itself.  The ensemble cast, containing a range of performers with and without disabilities, resists an audience’s attempt to dwell on one experience of ability or disability as definitive.  The episodic nature of the performance, placing autobiographical moments next to more non-representational ones, makes viewing the disability experience a more complicated and rich enterprise.  The Project relies on Brechtian techniques such as music and direct address to the audience as a way of alienating them from a tendency to sentimentalize or separate themselves from the disabled body.  Finally, the work does not restrict itself to disability alone, but instead explores its intersections with gender, race, age, class, and sexuality. 

While we will point to the efficacy of feminist theatre strategies in producing disability theatre, the Project’s work has revealed to participants areas of dissonance between the aims of each community.  Lennard Davis states in his study “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies,” that disability can connect meaningfully across disparate multicultural identities. Yet within our own work, we have discovered that some performers who are interested in portraying and interrogating disability culture are not necessarily as passionate about addressing, or even familiar with, the issues of gender, sexuality and race with which other group members have to contend.   For example, one participant voiced a concern that the overt inclusion of homosexuality in our work might somehow take away from the authority or authenticity of disability concerns.  Another respondent to our work voiced concerns that the very title of the work itself, in highlighting the word “disability,” subtly perpetuated a division between those with and without disabilities.  Will audiences successfully negotiate our attempt to perform authentic voices from disability culture without thinking that we claim to represent the complete truth of disability?  Is it problematic that at this juncture, certain issues are not represented, like blind and deaf cultures?  In presenting personal stories, do we risk linking them to sentimental narratives that put achievement and progress on the shoulders of the individual, rather than on society?

While we may not have conclusions or solutions to all these issues, we explore them in our study as we have encountered them in our production of The Disability Project.  As we continue to work on the Project, the potential—and potential difficulties of--underpinning disability performance with a feminist aesthetic become increasingly apparent.  We offer the story of what has thus far been a productive and rich experience in using strategies that have proven useful to feminist artists in representing a disability culture that has also been marginalized.