Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (review)

Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander’s Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, winner of the 2006 Best Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, is a groundbreaking anthology, the first text to explore thoroughly the intersections of performance studies and disability studies. For disability studies, the book is part of a new wave of anthologies: although the editors make clear, as others have before them, some of the basic tenets of this interdisciplinary field (the critique of medical models of disability, the commitment to the new disability identities that activists, scholars, and artists/performers have generated), the book mainly pushes beyond those tenets. Bodies in Commotion takes the existence of disability studies and vibrant disability cultures centered on performance as a given, and proceeds from that foundation to excavate how contemporary performance and performance studies more generally are being transformed by disability.

“Commotion,” the editors point out, connotes both unruliness and moving together. Focusing on “disability as performance,” they put forward a volume that positions the two fields as moving together but that also suggests disability and performance studies can play productively disruptive or unruly roles with each other. Throughout the anthology, disability as performance is played out in at least three ways: onstage by disabled performers (such as Mary Duffy, Cathy Weis, and members of the National Theatre of the Deaf); in everyday life by disabled people; and, finally, in and through the disability metaphors that saturate dramatic literature. The “stage” upon which disability as performance is located, moreover, is continually interrogated by these essays: several essays, for instance, examine the nontheatrical sites where people with dementia, learning disabilities, and other cognitive disabilities are engaged in generating new forms of performance.

Bodies in Commotion does a great deal to push disability studies in new directions. However, its biggest challenges are for the field of performance studies; it is in that location that the prizewinning anthology is most unruly or disruptive. Bodies in Commotion should push performance studies scholars to acknowledge the innovative work of disabled actors, playwrights, and performance artists and to comprehend how an incredible range of bodies, minds, and abilities has shaped both the history of performance and the myriad forms it takes today. The anthology should ensure that what Victoria Ann Lewis in “Theater without a Hero” terms a “hidden history of people with disabilities” (her analysis of the play P.H.*reaks, which takes that phrase as its subtitle) can no longer be ignored by scholars working on the performing arts.

If there is a tension legible in Bodies in Commotion, it is one that is legible throughout the field of disability studies. Complex questions of identity and representation—how disability identities are constituted, represented, and performed, and whether or how representations might function “positively”—run throughout these essays. Sandahl’s own essay, “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disability and Actor Training,” on the ableist norms structured into the very training of actors (especially the insistence on “neutrality” in actor training), is an important one in relation to these questions: as in other work, Sandahl demonstrates convincingly that material conditions contribute to significant underrepresentation of disabled people at all levels of the production process. The importance of increasing that representation, nonetheless, does not make less urgent questions raised elsewhere in the volume. As Stacy Wolf puts it in a footnote to “Disability’s Invisibility in Joan Schenkar’s Signs of Life and Heather McDonald’s An Almost Holy Picture,” “Valorizing ‘positive,’ ‘accurate’ images necessarily calls up the conundrum of visibility: What exactly is a positive representation? To whom? And who can decide?” (317).

The essay that engages these tensions most productively (and the essay that I would identify as the queerest in the volume, despite the fact that it is not explicitly in conversation with queer theory) is Sharon Snyder’s “Unfixing Disability in Lord Byron’s The Deformed Transformed.” From one perspective, Snyder...