EDITORIAL: Aesthetics and participation …

Does it ever happen that a theoretical perspective is articulated, accepted and then sealed from further debate? There is a process of development, application, critique and assessment. Among other things, scholarly journals offer their communities of readers and writers a space for continuing debate about the implications of concepts and conversations

Paralympic cultures: disability as paradigm

This is an article about the Paralympic Games of summer 2012 and the experience of watching them. It rehearses the use of disability as political and cultural identity in relation to theatre and performance studies. Disability identity is not an identity based on similitude, but is a complex and nuanced relationship between singularity of embodied social experience and glimmers of common ground. Taking the works of Rod Michalko and Petra Kuppers as a representative foundation of disability studies, the article offers disability as an epistemological standpoint, a way of thinking, and not an object of thought. The argument works through close readings of three examples to introduce the theatre and performance studies reader to the notion of disability as a paradigm for the consideration of ideas of difference, similitude and identity. The process of reading the Paralympics from the perspective of a disabled person, bike riding sports fan and disability performance scholar gestures to the scope and potential of disability performance studies. The article accumulates three examples of one disabled person navigating a complex set of positions, all of which are iterations of disability. Whilst this critical approach might imply solipsism, the article also considers disability as community

Freaks and not freaks: theatre and the making of crip identity

ON SOME LEVEL it seems obvious that some disabled actors will want to explore the history of freak show performances. To replicate a performance form that neither performer nor audience have experienced has the frisson of an historical re-enactment. Somewhere, people who looked like you were stared at as freaks by the audience. What would that have been like? For the freaks? For the spectator? This essay is an attempt to engage with the multiple possibilities of engagement and identity that are bound up in the idea of the freak shows, acting and spectatorship

The ‘Not Knowns’: memory, narrative and applied theatre

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an attempt to articulate and explore the relationship between the science of memory and the applied theatre project, The Not Knowns. The project was a collaboration between theatre practitioners and a psychologist who worked together with a group of young people known, problematically, as the ‘not knowns’ throughout 2014. For applied theatre practitioners, notions of veracity are crucial, if complex, and go far beyond the practice of ‘giving voice’ to marginalised groups and people. Applied Theatre projects which work with participant autobiographies take on the responsibility of articulating the perspective as one of many possible truths, observing conventions which sustain a truth claim, but leaving this open for questioning. In this essay, the project collaborators examine the implications of the notion of memory as adaptable and malleable, as a factor in stasis or change, and as a story that may and must be re-told and re-remembered in an act of self-sustaining performativity

Freaks and not freaks: theatre and the making of crip identity

On some level it seems obvious that some disabled actors will want to explore the history of freak show performances. To replicate a performance form that neither performer nor audience has experienced has the frisson of a historical re-enactment. Somewhere, people who looked like you were stared at as freaks by the audience. What would that have been like? For the freaks? For the spectator? This essay is an attempt to engage with the multiple possibilities of engagement and identity that are bound up in the idea of freak shows, acting and spectatorship. From their earliest days, UK based Graeae Theatre Company, artistically led by disabled people, have explored and used freak show images: their first piece, Sideshow, played wittily and angrily with the ways in which disabled people are enfreaked in their everyday lives. A later piece, The Last Freak Show engages with disability as a performance tradition. Disability theatre has developed a relationship with the freak show, and this has been explored in many performances in the UK and the USA. The freak show has also been used theatrically outside the boundaries of disability theatre, and the essay looks at Tennessee Williams’s atmospheric freak show play The Mutilated (1965) to explore the possibilities of the connections between theatre, stigma, and the proto-crip identity. The freak show is cited and quoted in the work of disabled performers, and this essay considers the uses of the cultural trope of the freak show in disability theatre. It considers the ways in which disability and freaks mutually alter each other. The essay claims that the notion of the freak show has implications for a performative elaboration of disabled bodies and also speculates about the possibility that disability theatre formalises the relationship between performer and spectator, overwriting more difficult, problematic, contingent relationships in favour of a performative construction of the disabled person and the disabling society

Active differences: disability and identity beyond postmodernism

This article looks at the recent examples of the uses disabled performers have made of freaks. It examines the strategy of linking freaks and disabled political subjects through the discussion of three performances: Graeae and Fittings' production of Mike Kenny's play The Last Freakshow; and Mat Fraser's two performances, Sealboy: Freak and Thalidomide! A Musical.The article argues that these three performances enable us to develop negotiations between identity (modelled as representational stasis) and endless alterity (modelled as perpetual flux). It is tempting to frame disabled performers as modern-day freaks, but that analysis doesn't work within the context of disability performance. There is a tension between political disability identity politics and the act of performing, especially when one claims a history that one never really had. Lyotard warns about strategies that incorporate the outside/other into the inside/same. Lacan offers a way to think about the perception and understanding of difference that can usefully be applied to the appropriation of freakshows. In these performances we experience significatory slippage in performance, and not just as disconnected theory. The performances that are discussed in this article are appropriations of ideas and images gleaned from the historical freakshow, with their particular constructions of performer/spectator relationships. Each of the three performances offers a contestation of meanings, a multiplicity of confusions surrounding the act of watching other bodies in a way that is legibly political.This article suggests that the process of negotiating meaning between freakishness and disability in these performances could point towards a critical and analytical practice for the future, enabling us to explore instability and incoherence without the loss of political possibility