Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance

Disrupting a Disembodied Status Quo: Invisible Theater as Subversive Pedagogy

Disrupting a Disembodied Status Quo Invisible Theater as Subversive Pedagogy Maureen Connolly & Tom Craig Invisible theater is a sociopolitical, dramaturgical, and pedagogic intervention formulated by critical educator and performing artist Augusto Boal. It is usually enacted in drama, theater, or performing arts programs, but is adaptable to almost any subject matter. A group chooses and researches an issue and the context in which it plans to make its intervention . The group creates, choreographs, scripts, and rehearses the “everyday event” it will perform, plans for members to observe the event, and arranges safe exits (should the staged nature of the event become “visible” or the participants ‹nd themselves in danger). Intervention works best if no one realizes that it is staged, that is, if the people for whom it is intended believe they are witnessing an unscripted event, not an educational intervention designed to create rupture and awaken dormant sensibilities. Hence the name invisible theater. As an intervention in disability, this pedagogy causes commotion. It unsettles the passive landscape of academic learning as separate from daily life. Indeed, it makes subversive demands that learners be intensely and thoughtfully immersed in everyday life, and it establishes the mundane world as a fruitful site for the construction of theory. Students in this participant -observer project must go beyond super‹cial preparation and take learning into their bodies in rigorous processes of social observation, dis243 ability etiological research, and social, political, and ‹nancial research as it pertains to living in the world with disability. The eventual performed events do not directly involve spectators, nor are they parodies of human experience. Rather—students come to discover—they are embodied constructions of disability experience informed by a disability studies orientation designed to disclose the cultural boundaries of “abnormal” behavior. One of the authors teaches a core introductory course in disability studies within a physical education and kinesiology degree program. In 1998, we introduced invisible theater as an assignment option in that course, and in other courses in the disability studies stream. We introduced invisible theater as a way to help students encounter the lived experience of “heterogeneous bodies,” that is, bodies that bring contingency, texture, complexity , contradictions, overlapping intersections, and, ultimately, the kind of difference that does not blend well into the landscape of a normally disembodied status quo. Our goal is to introduce students to the severely ableist culture we live in, a production-oriented culture in which persons with disabilities represents an unacceptable rupture in the expectation of fast-paced ef‹ciency, conformity, and the visible signs of ‹nancial productivity and capitalist success. Making visible the insidious cultural codes of production-oriented pace, we then describe the heterogeneity of all human bodies. Having included this assignment in the course, we also decided that the best way to explain it would be to model it in class, then unpack it as a group. We assembled a team that included students in the class, the teaching assistant, an instructor unknown to the students (one of the authors of this paper), and the course instructor (the other author of this paper). Together we designed our own invisible theater that we staged in class—students being unaware that anything other than a regular lecture was unfolding . In this essay we describe and analyze this textured, bodily experience, including the planning process, the actual intervention in class, students’ responses, and their experiences with their own invisible theater productions . We will foreground our description and analysis with a discussion of the theorists and theories that have in›uenced our project and animate our work. Theoretical In›uences Freire, Lather, Kristeva, Lanigan In his “Letter to North American Teachers,” Paulo Freire (1987) insists that since education is by nature social, historical, and political, the role of the teacher must not be discussed in terms of an imaginary, detached posi244 Bodies in Commotion Disrupting a Disembodied Status Quo 245 tion. Freire argues that “a teacher must be fully cognizant of the political nature of his or her practice, and assume responsibility for this rather than denying it” (211). From this critical perspective, the educator is an agent of change within a contested site of heterogeneity wherein “the political nature of education requires that the teacher either serve whoever is in power or present options to those in power” (212). Freire also insists that the “one dimension of every teacher’s role that is independent of political choice . . . is the act of teaching subject matter or content” (212). A progressive, politicized, sensitized teacher does...