Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (review)

Petra Kuppers brings valuable theoretical nuances to the examination of physical disability in western performance. In her work Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, Kuppers approaches the highly politicized art and artists of disability performance by positing a sophisticated study that moves beyond metaphorical understandings of disability on stage. In contrast, Kuppers argues for the demonstrable social and cultural effects of engaging with the identity of disability through performance. For Kuppers, disability in contemporary performance exists both as a crucial, but often obscured, component of theatre history and as a critical performance methodology, designed to challenge the way socialized subjects perceive and relate to the presence of physical difference.

Significantly, the central principle guiding Kuppers' exploration involves "the undoing of certainties, a questioning of categories about unknowability and difference" (4). Performance pushes against what Kuppers considers "safe knowledge" about self, body, and Other, to create opportunities for sensual, cognitive, and emotional engagement. Thus, Kuppers draws our attention to the ways in which the disabled performer employs aesthetic and theoretical techniques to privilege interconnection over segregation, disruption over stability, and the power of "encounter" over the preservation of an artistic product bound by a closed system of meaning. This agenda, Kuppers contends, is the responsibility of disability performance in the twenty-first century. Subsequently, what emerges from Kuppers' investigation also involves recognizing the new demands placed on the spectator, who is asked to employ different methods of meaning making in this continuous negotiation of shifting corporeal and political boundaries put into play by the confrontation with physical difference in performance.

The arrangement of the central materials in Disability and Contemporary Performance follows Kuppers' primary investment in destabilizing familiarity and conventionality. She begins by discussing the historiographical challenges involved in understanding the semiotics of the disabled body in performance, using the well-known arenas of the nineteenth-century "freak" show and medical theatre as popular performance/exhibition venues for those considered deviant. The first two chapters explicate this performance history and its reception by employing a Foucauldian approach to understanding disability as constructed through the relationship between social gazes and disciplinary structures. Kuppers then discusses the way that contemporary disabled artist Mat "The Sealboy" Fraser borrows from this historical formulation of the disabled to both comment upon and "disrupt the dominant organizing knowledge of freaks and normals" (46). The inability to render Fraser or his performance in a conventional frame authorizes an alternative history of the disabled body as a "freakish" spectacle and promotes a space for new histories to evolve, initiated and controlled by the performer. Kuppers further develops this notion of the disabled performer's agency in her exploration of the Austrian performance group Bilderwerfer, Bill Shannon's solo performance work, and the CandoCo dance company. Here, Kuppers discusses the theoretical complexities raised by these performances, specifically illuminating the labor of performance by attending to the execution and reception of a variety of dramatic strategies evident in the artists' works. In doing so, she calls attention to the limitations of these and other aesthetic operations, such as Brechtian Verfremdungseffect, to suggest that, as disabled performing artists participate in innovative social and political interventions, they must also develop alternate performance methodologies that facilitate a range of artistic and cultural effects.

However, what distinguishes this particular work on disability in the performing arts from recent scholarship on the same topic is Kuppers' ability to engage issues relating to both the materiality and the immateriality of performance. Beginning with the chapter "Outside Energies" and concluding with a discussion on the possibilities of virtual or cyborgian disability performance, Kuppers employs a phenomenological approach in order to privilege the tactile, the sensory, and the emotional energies generated in performance. Drawing primarily on the theories of Artaud, Kuppers discloses the ways in which disabled artists effectively utilize their corporeality and materiality to work towards an Artaudian "meta-physics of theatre" (76). According to Kuppers' understanding, disability performance becomes indebted to breaking down the performing subject into a "field of...