Disability Performance: Emancipating the Spectators
In: The Visual in Performance PracticeSearch for other papers by Adele Anderson in
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Jacques Rancière recognizes spectators as emancipated and performance as ‘an autonomous thing, between the idea of the artist and the sensation or comprehension of the spectator.’1 But disabled performers register with the audiences who judge their image in qualified and troubling ways; they become subject to the triple discipline of critical appraisal, the medical gaze, and public stares. I discuss two mixed ability dance performances separated by fifteen years, examining the shifts in one artist’s practice. I ask where aesthetic agency lodges, and how visual readings of disability may have changed since the 1990s. Through this lens I explore how the space of the visible in disability performance remains interpretively open to variable distributions of the sensible.