297 research outputs found
Performing immobility / protesting immobility:\ud The risks & rewards of public space protest performances
No full textThough there is much interest in mobilities and performing mobilities as a characteristic of modern, urban, social life today, this is not always matched by attention to immobilities, as the flipside of mobility in modern life. In this paper, I investigate public space performances designed to draw attention to precisely this counterpoint to current discourses of mobilities – performances about the socially produced immobilities many people with disabilities find a more fundamental feature of day-to-day life, the fight for mobility, and the freedom found when accommodations for alternative mobilities are made available. Although public policy is increasingly aligned with a social model of disability, which sees disability as socially constructed through systems, institutions and infrastructure deliberately designed to exclude specific bodies – stairs, curbs, queues and so forth – and although governments in the US, UK, and to a lesser degree Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth nations aim to address these inequalities, the experience of immobility is still every-present for many people. This often comes not just from pain, or from impairment, or event from lack of accommodations for alternative mobilities, but from fellow social performers’ antipathy to, appropriation of, or destruction of accommodations designed to facilitate access for a range of different bodies in public space, and thus the public sphere. The archetypal instance of this tension between the mobile, and those needing accommodations to allow mobility, is, of course, the antipathy many able bodied people feel towards the provision of disabled parking spaces. A cursory search online shows thousands of accounts of antagonism, vitriol, and even violence prompted by disputes which began when a disabled person asked an able person to exit a designated disabled parking space. For many, it seems, expecting them to pass by such parks so others can experience the mobility they take for granted is too much. In this paper, I examine a number of protest performances in public space in which activist present actions – for example, placing wheelchairs in every regular parking space in a precinct – to give bystanders, passersby and spectators, as well as antagonistic fellow social performers, a sense of what socially produced immobility feels like. I examine responses to such protest performances, and what they say about the potential social, political and ethical impacts of such protests, in terms of their potential to produce new attitudes to mobility, alternative mobility, and access to alternative modes of mobility
Do you see what I mean? charting changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in contemporary and pop cultural performance\ud
No full textThe meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances. Acts that are, as Maike Bleeker argues1, bound up with the scopic rules, regimes and narratives that apply in specific cultures at specific times. In Western culture, the disabled body has been seen as a sign of defect, deficiency, fear, shame or stigma. Disabled artists – Mat Fraser, Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson, Katherine Araniello, Liz Crow and Ju Gosling – have attempted, via performances that co-opt conventional images of the disabled body, to challenge dominant ways of representing and responding such bodies from within. In this paper, I consider what happens when non-disabled artists co-opt images of the disabled body to draw attention to, affirm, and even exoticise, eroticise or beautify, other modalities of or desires for difference. As Carrie Sandahl has noted2, the signs, symbols and somatic idiosyncrasies of the disabled body are, today, transported or translated into theatre, film and television as a metaphor or "master trope" for every body’s experience of difference. This happens in performance art (Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s use of a wheelchair in Chamber of Confessions), performance (Marie Chouinard's use of crutches, canes and walkers to represent dancers’ experience of becoming different or mutant during training in bODY rEMIX /gOLDBERG vARIATIONS), and pop culture (characters in wheelchairs in Glee or Oz). In this paper, I chart changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in such contexts. I use analysis of this cultural shift as a starting point for a re-consideration of questions about whether a face-toface encounter with a disabled body is in fact a privileged site for the emergence of a politics, and whether co-opting disability as a metaphor for a range of difference differences reduces its currency as a category around which a specific group might mobilise a politics
Staging Asian-Australian identities
No full textAbstract of conference paper presented as Hadley, Bree (2007) ‘Staging Asian-Australian\ud
Identities’, Asian-Australian Identities II, Asian-Australian Studies Research Network Conference,\ud
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, June 27-30 2007
Recognition, misrecognition and the crisis of meaning : the risky mechanics of staging the 'monstrous'
No full textAbstract of conference paper presented as Hadley, Bree (2008) ‘Recognition,\ud
Misrecognition and the Crisis of Meaning: The Risky Mechanics of Staging the\ud
‘Monstrous’’, presented at Re-constructing Asian-ness(es) in the Global Age,\ud
International Federation of Theatre Research / Federation International de la Recherche\ud
Theatrale Conference 2008, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea, July 14-19 2008
With a vengeance : staging identity in contemporary performance
No full textAbstract of conference paper presented as Hadley, Bree (2007) ‘‘With A Vengeance’: Staging\ud
Identity in Contemporary Performance’, presented at Extreme States: Issues of Scale –\ud
Political, Performative, Emotional, Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and\ud
Performance Studies Conference 2007, University of Melbourne/LaTrobe University,\ud
Melbourne, Australia, 3-6 July 2007.
The social experiment – Pranks, political activism, and performing stigma
No full textAs part of curated panel with Petra Kuppers, Bree Hadley, Patrick Anderson, Kirsty Johnson on "Contemporary Disability Performance: From Theatre to Social Practice"\ud
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Disabled theatre artists in the Americas and abroad routinely negotiate precarity in and through performance. While panelists do not wish to romanticize the generative potential of precarity, it is important to attend closely to disabled artists’ productive negotiations with it. How, precisely, does performance move to social practice in these instances? Building in part from Shannon Jackson’s identification of the support structures of participatory art, the papers on this panel investigate moments when support structures fail, draw attention to precarity, and are recast through disability performance. Panelist Patrick Anderson will focus on performative navigations of cross-cutting institutions of medicine and “health” in the US context, particularly before and after the Affordable Care Act, and the inter-subjective “socials” that develop within and around them. Bree Hadley will investigate the phenomenon of so-called ‘social experiments,’ where people perform stigmatised identities in public spaces and places as a form of edgework, in which risk is always part of the practice. Kirsty Johnston will consider the recent work of Vancouver’s NeWorld Theatre as part of a broader investigation into the politics, aesthetics and infrastructures behind several targeted initiatives to build more inclusive professional theatre practices. Petra Kuppers will discuss speculative performance experiments, disability performances that engage version of slanted, cripped futurity, with a focus on breath. Drawing upon Afrofuturist guidance, Petra will engage a range of contemporary performance experiments in the suspension of precarity to address how performance methods can engage speculative bodies, encounters, and temporalities
The last avant-garde?: Disability arts and (rethinking) mobility
No full textTaking as its starting point a remark by Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare that disability arts is “the last avant garde”, this panel focuses on the role of aesthetic experimentation in disability arts and the possible rethinking of the relationship between avant-garde aesthetic strategies and inclusive arts. Points of connection between the avant-garde and disability arts include a rejection of traditional aesthetic forms, the development of aesthetic strategies appropriate to non-normative bodies, politics and populations and the implications of these ideas for the conference themes.\ud
This panel is intended as a facilitated discussion involving researchers and artists undertaking work in this area. The panel will begin with some brief provocations reflecting on the implication of Shonibare’s comment. For example, Gerard Goggin will discuss three projects by Antoni Abad with artists and activists with disability in Barcelona, Geneva and Montreal as part of Abad’s Megaphone project, a decade-long, global digital art project. Bree Hadley will speak on performative interventions in public space, performance art, live art, activism and culture hacking by artists with disabilities, such as pwd's online performances, and artist’s performative responses to the austerity agenda in the US, UK, and Australasia. Eddie, Lachlan and Sarah will discuss ideas arising from their work on the project Beyond Access: The Creative Case for Inclusive Arts, which involved research with six Melbourne-based artists/artistic companies with disability, supported by Arts Access Victoria.\ud
Chair: Dr Eddie Paterson (School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne)\ud
Dr Bree Hadley (Creative Industries, QUT) \ud
Professor Gerard Goggin (Professor of Media and Communication and ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney)\ud
Dr Lachlan MacDowall (Head, Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne).\ud
Sarah Austin (PhD candidate, Theatre/Centre for Cultural Partnerships, VCA and MCM)\ud
Artists (tbc, based on existing relationships with artists developed in the Beyond Access research)
Disability, public space performance & spectatorship : Unconscious performers
No full textWhy would disabled people want to re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the everyday encounters in public spaces and places that cast them as ugly, strange, stare-worthy? 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 do exactly this. Operating in a live or performance art paradigm, artists like James Cunningham (Australia), Noemi Lakmaier (UK/Austria), Alison Jones (UK), Aaron Williamson (UK), Katherine Araniello (UK), Bill Shannon (US), Back to Back Theatre (Australia), Rita Marcalo (UK), Liz Crow (UK) and Mat Fraser (UK) all use installation and public space performance practices to re-stage their disabled identities in risky, guerilla-style works that remind passersby of their own complicity in the daily social drama of disability. In doing so, they draw spectators' attention to their own role in constructing Western concepts of disability. This book investigates the way each of us can become unconscious performers in a daily social drama that positions disability people as figures of tragedy, stigma or pity, and the aesthetics, politics and ethics of performance practices that intervene very directly in this drama. It constructs a framework for understanding the way spectators are positioned in these practices, and how they contribute to public sphere debates about disability today
Exist documentation: description of creative works in the International Live Art Event "exist in 08"
No full textThe works that come together under the banner of Exist in 08 invoke themes of identity,\ud
memory, history and legacy, and human exchanges across the boundaries of times, spaces,\ud
nations and disciplines. What legacy will Exist in 08 leave in the individual and collective\ud
memory of artists, scholars and audiences? In the past decade, scholars of live art have\ud
become increasing absorbed by discussion of the archive, and the questions of what remains\ud
of artists’ transient, time-based interventions in the aesthetic, social and political sphere.\ud
Today, the archive is framed as active, and productive – a fertile repository of records that\ud
actively reach out to their own future role in an as-yet-unauthored archaeology of practice.\ud
Photos, texts, footage and artefacts of live art practices stimulate productive new encounters,\ud
productive new interpretations, allowing the exchanges that take place at an event like Exist\ud
in 08 to extend beyond the event itself, and inform the ongoing development of the artists,\ud
the artform, and scholarly research into the artform. As part of the activities at Exist in 08, Dr\ud
Bree Hadley leads a Queensland University of Technology funded research project that\ud
develops DVD and other documentation of some of the streams of activity at the festival
Where does practice live? How a magdamodel helped develop a sense of belonging between practitioners and academic researchers [PANEL]
No full textAbstract of panel presented as Cochrane, Bernadette, Hadley, Bree, Kehoul, Gillian and Kennedy,\ud
Flloyd (2008) ‘Where Does Practice Live? How a Magdamodel Helped Develop a Sense of Belonging\ud
Between Practitioners and Academic Researchers [PANEL]’, Chaired by Julie Robson,\ud
Turangawaewae/A Sense of Place, Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance\ud
Studies Conference 2008, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, June 30-July 3 2008
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