WTP Conference Presentation, Summer 2001
Panel:  “Embodied Environments 1:  Migrating Subjects”

Five Minute Prequel

As audience members enter into the conference room, some graduate students meet them, greeting them, welcoming them. As audience members go to their seats, they are invited to sit down, relax, close their eyes. A graduate student is positioned at the head of the room, audio describing what is going on.  She describes how people are coming in, what they are doing.

Joan and Ann enter, preparing to do their presentation.  Ann motions to some of the graduate students to come and sit down—Joan protests, “Ann, we just don’t have enough room.”  They ad lib a discussion disagreeing about whether those who are standing can be included/accommodated.  

[Show clip of Thea “carving” the air at the start of “Gotta Move”]

ANN:   Disability theorists David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder suggest, disability has long been used in literature—and that includes dramatic literature—as that against which to invoke and define the normal body.  
Ok, what's the connection between how we opened our presentation today, the clip we just showed you and the topic of today's panel, "Embodied Environments?"   There's an obvious parallel to issues of physical access to theatre spaces for persons with disabilities.  But the relationship of embodiment and physical space gives rise to additional questions about disability and how it is used in performance. 
 

1. Who is the audience?  (JOAN)
2. Who gets to be in the audience?  (ANN)
3. Who is on stage and can physically get onto the stage?  (JOAN)
4. Who is seen as a “legitimate” performer on stage (ANN)
5. What are some ways that disability might be incorporated into theatrical experience as more than, to use David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s term, a narrative prosthesis? (JOAN)
6. ANN EXPLAINS WHAT NARRATIVE PROSTHESIS 
7. How do you invite audiences to re-see disability as a valued form of diversity as opposed to a lack?  (JOAN)
8. How do you encourage nondisabled audience members think of disability as more than a unfied, monolithic experience? How do you encourage them to value those experiences, and to also possibly see the relevance to their own lives?  (ANN)

     JOAN:  What we want to do in our time today is explore our responses, as they relate to one community-based grassroots theatre company, The DisAbility Project.  We will try to respond in a variety of ways, some anecdotally,
    
     ANN: …others using literary analysis

     JOAN:  And, of course, bad quality video, for which we ask your powers of forgiveness and imagination.
    
     As many of you know, it has only been 11 years since the ADA was signed into law as the most comprehensive legal protection for people with disabilities.  In terms of civil rights movements such as those advocating for women, African-Americans, and gays and lesbians, for example, the disability rights movement is still fairly young, although disability itself is as old as our earliest consciousness. 

           
     ANN:  Disability theorist Lennard Davis points out that disability is a social construction that is the result of a “set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body” (2).  That our culture is based on ableist assumptions that privilege the able body is most immediately evident in the shapes of our public spaces, many of which (the ADA notwithstanding) are still designed in ways that are not accessible for large groups of the disabled.  This physical space is a clear embodiment of the attitudes that lay behind its construction.  The ideas circulating between the performers and audiences have long suggested these attitudes as well. 

JOAN:  And that, in part, is why I created The DisAbility Project. So let me give you a short history of the Project. (She does so).
    

ANN:  Let’s turn to the questions. Who is the audience?

JOAN: Or, who as well as who gets to be in the audience?

ANN:  Yeah, right.

JOAN:  In The DisAbility Project, we want to question the assumptions about who can and should come to the theatre. We’ve elected to perform outside most traditional theatre buildings for several reasons.  Theatre is most often a self-selecting audience.   In my opinion, often, although admittedly not always, people go to see what confirms their own world view.  Ironically, for those who seek to have their world view expanded, some of the most innovative and cutting-edge theatre is often the least physically accessible.  In addition, most theatre spaces are not very conducive to audiences with physical challenges. 

But beyond that, frankly, I am just not a fan of the proscenium, or fixed seating.  I think both fix the stage picture, fix the audience interaction (with each other as well as the actors) and thus, fix or limit the imagination.  It is important to think about environments not just as physical spaces, but also as populated spaces.  So what are the implications if we go into a government office building? Or into an economically-disadvantaged inner-city public school?  How might the experience unfold because we have come to them, and to their space? 

ANN:  We think that most people are uncomfortable with and afraid of disability issues, and so I think when we go into their spaces, they are in a familiar setting that makes it more comfortable for them to explore
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JOAN:  We also choose to go into different spaces, because people who might come to see the Project of their own volition are perhaps already open to the issues and the aesthetic that The DisAbility Project presents.   We want to go beyond who might typically choose to come see us, and go into the spaces where people gather, where they are, to hopefully give them a profound social and civic, as well as theatrical, experience. 

ANN:  We see our audience as the entire community.  And in this regard, The DisAbility Project is building on the rich tradition of street theatre of the 1960s, that recognized the political efficacy of reaching nontraditional audiences. 

JOAN: A quick story: recently, I was on an arts forecasting panel at the St. Louis Symphony recently.  It was a typical affair. All the local majors: the art museum, the opera, etc.  And somehow, me.  The big topic was the audience: where are the audiences?  And I said, (making few friends in my comment), “I think you mean the white, upper middle-class audiences with considerable disposable time and income, because there is no shortage of audiences.”  Who might these audiences be? 

ANN:  Well, students, whether in grade or graduate school, office workers, civil servants, academics, faith-based organizations, temporary communities such as conferences or special events, those interested in innovative theatre, and of course, people with disabilities.
                       
           cut?ANN:  Who is on stage, and can physically get to the stage?

JOAN:  One of the ways we figured out that perhaps traditional theatre spaces aren’t where we should be anyway, is when we have been invited to go to places that then prove inaccessible.  For example, we were invited to perform at the Missouri Botanical Garden—but the stage is not accessible there. The human resource manager asked, “well, can’t somebody carry them down the steps?” and “well, if they can’t do that, or get onto the stage, can’t somebody else play their part?”  Yeah, this really happened.  These attitudes reflect an inattention to the mobility of performers with disabilities, to providing a kind of space in which they can move.  The work of the DisAbility Project is about raising questions such as,

ANN:  Who is seen as a “legitimate” performer? 

              JOAN:  The design of the performances is to show what DisAbility Project members can do, not simply in a way that evokes overcoming, but rather, in a way that emphasizes the aesthetic possibilities for interesting stage pictures and events present in disability movement and disability culture. 

              ANN:  The notion of training, or a certain kind of training and status are what have kept many people from expressing themselves in creative ways.  And as we know, this certain socially-prescribed notion of training and quality has historically excluded women, people of color, gay and lesbian artists, and so on. 

              JOAN:  I have a particular interest in non-actors, or citizen actors, as I prefer to call them, because I think they bring something interesting to the experience.  My qualifications for someone to participate are quite different than most companies.  Can someone commit to coming to rehearsal and performances on a somewhat regular basis? Do they have the social skills to interact in a group?  (And we have had cases where people cannot.) Can they memorize their lines? Do they have reliable transportation (and that could mean hooking up with someone else in the group to get there)? Are they committed to creating original material? Can they contribute to the well-being of the group? Do they understand that, while we honor the individual, we also believe that there is a value to commitment, to a shared purpose, and that this mutual understanding can make many things possible?  Do they want to have fun?  (Because we are making plays, which involves playing.)  These are the things that I ask myself.  If they want to do these things, we have many ways we can access their creativity. 

              ANN:  And they can help us access ours. 

JOAN:  I arrived at this model for a variety of political and personal reasons. I remember having an audition in Chicago, for my play Small Domestic Acts, where we saw over 100 people for four parts; in that production, I never really saw what I was looking for, although I was open to being taken in new directions. And I began to question the social model of much of the theatre I was seeing:  people audition, usually there is a lead, and for every one who gets cast, there are a lot more interested people who never get to participate.  I began to change my perspective about how to make work.  And I now essentially make it with anyone who shows up, as long as they show up consistently with an open heart and mind, and can enter into a social contract about the purpose of what we do.  Grassroots theatre is a highly appropriate model for doing this, as it circumvents traditional models of training and theatre-making.  It and we are transgressive, and proud of it. We are not named “That Uppity Theatre Company” for nothing. 

cut? ANN:  How do you incorporate disability into the theatrical experience? 

Let’s take a look now at some more specific examples about how The DisAbility Project works.

This piece is called “Employment.”

[SHOW THE CLIP FROM "EMPLOYMENT"(approx 1:30)]

ANN:  "Employment" comically and pointedly skewers the attitudes underlying employer unwillingness to hire the disabled based on assumptions about what they can and cannot do.  When the character played by Katie Banister applies for a job, she is quickly turned down on the grounds that she will "turn off the customers," not be up to the rigors of a "pretty demanding job," and is only suited for the "sheltered workshop."  "Can this situation be saved?" asks Banister, turning to the audience for resolution.  This Brechtian intervention derails the story from heading down the familiar pathway of overcoming or inspirational narrative.  In some settings, the audience is given the opportunity to create potential solutions to the dilemma, imagining how the workplace and the workers' roles could include the disabled.  Members of the Project have also created alternate endings that can be presented if an audience is less inclined to participate, endings in which they, along with the manager, are invited to "open their minds."

JOAN:  How do you invite audiences to re-see disability differently? 

As a live medium, theatre has the potential to compress the distance between performer and audience, and in the case of The DisAbility Project, the actors work to refigure the languages—both visual and verbal--that have worked to construct the disabled person in society. 

One way this happens is through visually recasting the disabled body on stage.  [Show clips here of "Gotta Move" (2:10) and "Waiting" (:54).]  In each of these pieces, the intent is not only to create a visually engaging stage picture; it is likewise to present the disabled body in a way traditionally ignored in our culture: as the site for embodied movement, although that movement might not be considered “typical” or “normal.”  To represent this difference, however, is not to invoke the rhetoric of the wondrous, where we as audience are invited to marvel at the spectacle of the disabled dancing--actually dancing!--"despite" their injury or condition. Rather, these moments stage able-bodied and disabled performers together, moving in the ways that are expressive for them and at once aesthetically engaging and challenging to audiences. 

JOAN:  And it is important that we show disabled and non-disabled performers together, to politicize and visually recast how we see movement on stage as well as to create a model of inclusion. 

ANN:  In "Waiting," there is an additional wry reversal; this movement becomes a way to vent the frustration and sheer boredom that many people with disabilities are subject to in their role as "impassive" and "stilled" in society--a role entertainingly symbolized in the microcosm of the medical waiting room!
   
In many of the pieces, the disabled performers are staring back, resisting their place as the "object of the stare."  What’s different here is that both the disabled and non-disabled performers stare back in a transgressive act.  This relationship between viewer and viewed has some similarities to what we have often historically discussed here between women and those who would make them the "object of the gaze." But as Thomson has pointed out, while in each case a power relationship is established, for the person with the disability, their disability is the thing stared at, the part taken to stand for the whole.  Moments of direct address in many of the pieces, and the ensuing insistence that the performers be recognized as complete individuals, resist this power dynamic.
         
The DisAbility Project also posess a challenge to literal rhetoric. It denaturalizes a use of language that stigmatizes disability, such as in an opening piece called “Facts and Figures.”

cut? ANN:  How do you encourage nondisabled audience members to value disability experiences, and to also possibly see the relevance to their own lives? 
         
JOAN:  The diversity within The DisAbility Project is crucial to our company, for a number of reasons.  The stage picture created by the interaction of persons with and without visible disabilities challenges the notion that disabilities are necessarily physically apparent.  This is an extension of the complication of the category of disability which happens when actors with a wide--and not exhaustive--range of disabilities appear together.  It’s also advantageous or deliberate.  No one actor is singled out in a sideshow-like manner; nor is there a singular narrative that is presented as the defining disability experience. 

ANN:  We are interested in circumventing the notion of a singular story with a singular truth.  Likewise, working  with actors with and without disabilities challenges the binary that, in the past, has kept the disabled in separate but equal performances of the "very special" kind, a kind that sentimentalizes them and perpetuates the notion that there is a normal theatre against which they exist in opposition. 

JOAN:  And finally, additionally, we are not only presenting theatre, we are presenting social models, and we think by having a variety of disabled and nondisabled people on stage, we are modeling a kind of cooperative society that can and should exist.  We are modeling possibilities; there is a utopian intent to it, by which we can show people that they can be in the world together.
         
ANN:  In our work, we emphasize the manner in which disability can connect across other experiences of identity.  Disability, after all, is unique in that unlike other categories such as race, gender, or sexuality, it is a community which anyone can join at any time.  Thomson calls this disability's "universalizing" potential--not to erase differences between individuals, but rather, to become a connection among individuals in the way that no other more fixed identity category can.  We are all, after all, on our way to being disabled by virtue of the aging process; likewise, we could all become disabled at any instant.

JOAN: This next clip is from a piece called “Coffeehouse.”

[Show clip from "Coffeehouse" (1:14)]  This story emerged from the real-life experiences of one of the group members.  Many of the other group members had had a similar experience of being barred from a public place because of their disability, so I heard the single narrative as a piece for several voices.  In the piece, several people who use wheelchairs reclaim their agency by being at the center and the only ones to speak, while the able-bodied performers are silent and on the margins, visually amplifying the story through movement.   The audience is invited to engage with the performance on several levels; to understand the daily lived experience of having a disability in an ableist society, and also to connect the "Coffeehouse" experience with a time at which they, themselves, might have been excluded from some activity or space.

cut? There are two elements of performance in “Coffeehouse” coming together which actually perform a whole: speech, by the disabled performers, and movement, by the nondisabled performers. 

JOAN:  There is actually more we could say about that piece.  But let’s look at another piece, called “Go Figure.”
   
[Show the four-minute clip from the Sheldon performance of GO FIGURE (4:18); begin it from mid-way, when Katie has come out of the hospital.]

ANN:  In "Go Figure," because Katie Banister trades off the telling of her story with Rich Scharf, an openly gay member of the company, the piece likewise troubles the sense that it is only a heterosexist narrative.  Rich's presence as gender bender, as periodic voice with and to Katie, provides a connection to queer sexualities that have also been historically pathologized and marginalized.  As you can see, we do not focus on one category of race, gender, sexuality, or ability. Rather, we talk about the interrelationship of several kinds of identity within the theatre that we are creating.

ANN:  The Project also tries to establish connection with audience members through the use of humor and the deconstruction of fear.  There is a camp sensibility to much of the humor that runs throughout the piece, with frequent references to popular culture.  For example, during the piece "Parking," a man who has thoughtlessly parked in a disabled parking space finds himself "busted" by the "Quad Squad"--an avenging quartet of paraplegics who wryly deflate the notion that the disabled are passive and disinterested.  In the piece, we also reclaim and subvert pop culture in humorous ways for our own means.  In “Parking,” a Clint Eastwood movie, the Mission Impossible soundtrack, and mod squad visuals are a part of this. 

The physicality of much of the humor--including the faux-French posturing of "Coffeehouse," the frenzy of "Waiting" and the shopper's battle royale of "Employment,"--extend the invigorated, lively presence of the disabled body, and create pieces that are engaging for many different kinds of audience.   A schoolchild could watch “Coffeehouse,” for example, and be delighted by the physicality of it, while someone who had a different level of sophistication would be able to read the verbal and nonverbal choruses reinforcing one another.
 
 JOAN:   Prior to a post-show discussion, we usually close our performances with “Meet Me,”in which members of the group take turns introducing one another.  The performers with disabilities speak frankly about their individual conditions, but these conditions are introduced in the context of other information we learn about them--who they are, their profession, their hobbies, their personal life.  In this way, disability is established as a part of the person's life and identity, but not the single defining characteristic; it is neither ignored nor made to stand for the entire individual.  Openly acknowledging the disability defuses the discomfort or curiosity audience members might be prone to focus on, and is an attempt to redirect that anxiety into a productive relationship of understanding.

ANN:  One of the reasons we have felt it appropriate to speak to WTP today is that there's a certain irony in how omnipresent disability is in feminist theatre.  "Feminists today," notes Thomson, "often invoke negative images of disability to describe the oppression of women," and that theoretical use finds its artistic corollary with astonishing regularity in feminist playwriting.  Perhaps this is not so surprising, given that disability has been used, in the words of Mitchell and Snyder, as the "master trope of human disqualification." 

JOAN:  Yet, we want to emphasize the connection the Project posits between the experiences of women and the disabled. Like female bodies, disabled bodies have been marginalized because of their deviation from a physical norm which has traditionally been masculine, white, and middle class.  Disabled bodies are subject to the same kinds of essentializing structures that have circumscribed female bodies.  We see a very strong relationship between work about disability and women; it is all about this examining and re-imagining socially constructed value systems.

CONCLUSIONS:

JOAN: We’d like to end for now by asking you to consider some questions.  What opportunities might we take, as women in theatre, from considering these questions about embodiment through the lens of disability performance?

cut?  For example, when you change the power dynamic of the gaze, as we do, what is the relationship between the audience and the actors?  How might we encourage  more productive relationships between audiences and actors? 

ANN:  How does disability figure in your work in the classroom, whether in the use of dramatic literature, theory, acting exercises, and/or directing?

JOAN:  How does disability figure on your campus? Are your classrooms, theatre spaces, offices easily accessible?

ANN:  How frequently are you able to offer opportunities for communities to form around issues and new material to be constructed? How inclusive is your classroom?

JOAN:  What are we saying to young people when we primarily focus on directing and teaching plays that have a very limited number of roles, or in which people may only appear and move in fairly prescribed ways?

ANN:  How can we make theatre in academia a vehicle/create opportunities so that making theatre might be a life-changing experience for students?  How can we help them to make connection with wider issues in the world?

JOAN:  How can we model a more democratic society, where, if you show up with an open heart, an open mind, and a work ethic, there’s a place for you?  What are the values we pass on to students when only a few people can be cast? What message do we send about their value as creative beings?

For us, the model of The DisAbility Project goes beyond purely disability issues.  It’s a different model of making work that offers new opportunities and for theatre majors, it offers new opportunities to consider how they might make theatre their life’s work, as opposed to chasing the elusive, diminishing, and problematic commercial theatre world. Isn’t it our ethical responsibility to offer new models for theatre students for how they might pursue work in the theatre when they get out of school?