In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.

This edited collection investigates the myriad ways in which disability performance travels in a globalized world. Disability arts festivals are growing in different parts of the world; theatre and dance companies with disabled artists are increasingly touring and collaborating with international partners. At the same time, theatre spaces are often not accessible, and the necessity of mobility excludes some disabled artists from being part of an international disability arts community. How does disability performance travel, who does not travel – and why? What is the role of funding and producing structures, disability arts festivals and networks around the world? How do the logics of international (co-)producing govern the way in which disability art is represented internationally? Who is excluded from being part of a touring theatre or dance company, and how can festivals, conferences, and other agents of a growing disability culture create other forms of participation, which are not limited to physical co-presence? This study will contextualize disability aesthetics, arts, media, and culture in a global frame, yet firmly rooted in its smaller national, state, and local community settings and will be of great interest to students and scholars in the field.

Incapacity and Theatricality acknowledges the distinctive contribution to contemporary theatrical performance made by actors with intellectual disabilities. It presents a close examination of certain key theatrical performances across a variety of different media, including John Cassavetes’ 1963 social issues film A Child Is Waiting; the performance art collaboration between Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles; and the provocative pranksterism of Christoph Schlingensief’s talent show mockumentary FreakStars 3000. Tracing a global path of performances, Incapacity and Theatricality offers an analysis of how actors with intellectual disabilities have emerged onto the main stage, and how their inclusion calls into question long-held assumptions about both theatre and intellectual disability. For postgraduate students, or anyone interested in the shifting dynamics of twenty-first century theatre, McCaffrey’s work offers a vital consideration of the intersubjective relations between people with and without intellectual disabilities and ultimately addresses urgent questions about the situation and representation of the contemporary subject caught up somewhere between incapacity and theatricality.

In the last 30 years, a distinctive intersection between disability studies – including disability rights advocacy, disability rights activism, and disability law – and disability arts, culture, and media studies has developed. The two fields have worked in tandem to offer critique of representations of disability in dominant cultural systems, institutions, discourses, and architecture, and develop provocative new representations of what it means to be disabled. Divided into 5 sections: Disability, Identity, and Representation Inclusion, Wellbeing, and Whole-of-life Experience Access, Artistry, and Audiences Practices, Politics and the Public Sphere Activism, Adaptation, and Alternative Futures this handbook brings disability arts, disability culture, and disability media studies – traditionally treated separately in publications in the field to date – together for the first time. It provides scholars, graduate students, upper level undergraduate students, and others interested in the disability rights agenda with a broad-based, practical and accessible introduction to key debates in the field of disability art, culture, and media studies. An internationally recognised selection of authors from around the world come together to articulate the theories, issues, interests, and practices that have come to define the field. Most critically, this book includes commentaries that forecast the pressing present and future concerns for the field as scholars, advocates, activists, and artists work to make a more inclusive society a reality.

This collection is the first book to focus on the intersection of dance, disability, and the law. Bringing together a range of writers from different disciplines, it considers the question of how we value, validate, and speak about diversity in performance practice, with a specific focus on the experience of differently-abled dance artists within the changing world of the arts in the United Kingdom. Contributors address the legal frameworks that support or inhibit the work of disabled dancers and explore factors that affect their full participation, including those related to policy, arts funding, dance criticism, and audience reception.

This is the first book to explore how far disability challenges dominant understandings of rurality, identity, gender and belonging within the rural literature. The book focuses particularly on the ways disabled people give, and are given, meaning and value in relation to ethical rural considerations of place, physical strength, productivity and social reciprocity. A range of different perspectives to the issues of living rurally with a disability inform this work. It includes the lived experience of people with disabilities through the use of life history methodologies, rich qualitative accounts and theoretical perspectives. It goes beyond conventional notions of rurality, grounding its analysis in a range of disability spaces and places and including the work of disability sociologists, geographers, cultural theorists and policy analysts. This interdisciplinary focus reveals the contradictory and competing relations of rurality for disabled people and the resultant impacts and effects upon disabled people and their communities materially, discursively and symbolically. Of interest to all scholars of disability, rural studies, social work and welfare, this book provides a critical intervention into the growing scholarship of rurality that has bypassed the pivotal role of disability in understanding the lived experience of rural landscapes.

The Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts represents a truly multi-dimensional exploration of the inter-relationships between audiences and performance. This study considers audiences contextually and historically, through both qualitative and quantitative empirical research, and places them within appropriate philosophical and socio-cultural discourses. Ultimately, the collection marks the point where audiences have become central and essential not just to the act of performance itself but also to theatre, dance, opera, music and performance studies as academic disciplines. This Companion will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates, as well as to theatre, dance, opera and music practitioners and performing arts organisations and stakeholders involved in educational activities.

Disability impacts everyone in some way. Approximately 10-20% of the world’s population live with disability, and the associated issues affect not just these individuals but also their friends, family, and colleagues. When looking at it this way, it is strange that disability continues to be thought of as an anomaly—either as a medical problem located in a damaged body or something that exists exclusively outside the body, in a society that takes little account of non-normative bodies. Critical disability studies both questions these existing notions of disability and interrogates how they have become a part of the academic attitude towards the field. As the first comprehensive handbook on critical disability studies, this volume provides an authoritative overview of the subject. Including 32 chapters written by established scholars and emerging, next-generation researchers it also includes contributions from activists, writers, and practitioners from the global north and the global south. Divided into three parts: Representation, art, and culture; Media, technology, and communication; and Activism and the life course, it offers discussions on core critical disability studies topics including the social model, technology studies, trauma studies, representation, and queer theory, as well as ground-breaking work on emerging and cutting-edge areas such as neurodiversity and critical approaches in the Middle East, United States, Australia, and Europe. It is required reading for all academics and students working in not just critical disability studies but sociology, digital accessibility and inclusion, health and social care, and social and public policy more broadly.

This succinct and engaging text examines the complex relationship between theatre and disability, bringing together a wide variety of performance examples in order to explore theatrical disability through the conceptual frameworks of disability as spectacle, narrative, and experience. Accessible and affordable, this is an ideal resource for theatre students and lovers everywhere.

Political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance. Theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. Further, it is crucial to bring the concepts of theatre and performance deployed by other disciplines such as psychology, law, political anthropology, sociology among others into a wider, as well as deeper, interdisciplinary engagement. Embodying and fostering that engagement is at the heart of this new handbook. The Handbook brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance to map out the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. The authors--drawn from a wide range of disciplines--investigate the relationship between politics and performance to show that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, and that they also share, to a large extent, a common communicational base and language. The volume is organized into seven thematic sections: the interdisciplinary theory of politics and performance; performativity and theatricality (protest, regulation, resistance, change, authority); identities (race, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, indigeneity); sites (states, borders, markets, law, religion); scripts (accountability, authority and legitimacy, security, ceremony, sustainability); body, voice, and gesture (representation, leadership, participation, rhetoric, disruption); and affect (media, care, love empathy, comedy, populism, memory).