- Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre by Kirsty Johnson
Kirsty Johnston's Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre is a groundbreaking work: a book-length study of the emergence and development of a national theatrical tradition fuelled by disability activism. As a disabled performance practitioner and scholar, it makes me proud and happy to read it; I'm glad to see our diverse and intricate worlds so beautifully researched and documented.
Even twenty years ago, such a book would have been nearly unimaginable or else, at least, deemed unmarketable. As Johnston chronicles, the development of a consciousness about the civil rights, access, and aesthetics of disability on stage is a relatively new phenomenon in Canada (and elsewhere): the earliest moments of the theatre history Johnston traces lie in the mid-eighties, with the founding of Theatre Terrific in Vancouver in 1985, one of the first disability-focused companies in the country. Through a careful analysis of aspects of the theatrical trade often neglected by more aesthetics-focused analysts, Johnston shows how this company moved from its status as a small-scale educational theatre to its sophisticated contemporary disability arts profile today. She focuses on the producer/directors, on the development of funding strategies, on trustee boards, and on particular inclusion policies for auditions. With this, Johnston's line of inquiry aligns well with the attention theatre scholar Shannon Jackson gives to infrastructures, to the kinds of support that make performance possible, to the embedment of creative practice in national and local frameworks.1 This kind of attention yields fine-grained observations. Johnston teases out that the make-up of governing boards, for instance, is an important aspect of disability theatre: is an organization founded or led by non-disabled people? What inter-organizational policies are in place that ensure professional development not just within the creative side of the business, but also in the business leadership? These are exactly the type of questions that move many disabled people as they enter the theatrical machinery. The answers to these questions are at least as important to career development and flourishing as a company's scope for aesthetic innovation.
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Another successful strand of Johnston's analysis is her attention to how infrastructural issues make an impact on artistic choices. Since the beginning of disability performance [End Page 93] criticism in the late nineties, many writers in the field (myself included) have come from a fairly overtly politicized aesthetic place, with exclusion usually stingingly felt. A boom in disability performance in the twenty-first century made it possible for a critic not always to begin with the assertion that, yes, disabled people can be artful, too. Johnston rightfully takes this as a given, and she does not engage in long analyses of how disabled people signify in public, the kind of theoretical labour that characterized most of the first ten years of disability performance criticism.
Johnston's survey is wide and encompasses many different political projects. Some of the work she discusses, such as Realwheels' Spine, part of the Canadian Cultural Olympiad, emerges from a technologically sophisticated contemporary theatre aesthetic. But other productions discussed here have actors "crippling up"—that is, non-disabled performers playing being disabled—an anathema to many political practitioners. Johnston's assessment of these productions is not interested in political condemnation. Instead, she analyses how the development of a national politics can be understood within a particular production's context. Thus, for instance, she notes that the Vancouver Playhouse's 2009 The Miracle Worker, a play about Helen Keller, has no disabled actors. But instead of noting this only as a missed opportunity, she analyses the lack of engagement with these casting choices in the mainstream and the activist media of Canada (in contrast to revivals of The Miracle Worker in other places, where activists did protest). And she shows how this particular production marked a significant...