Dancing in the Blind Spot

"Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge" by Petra Kuppers (London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 224 pp.)

"Disability and Contemporary Performance" by Petra Kuppers offers the reader compelling historical and cultural perspectives in considering the evolution of the disabled performer. Along the way, the author contextualizes this discussion within a political format, demonstrating that the label of “disabled” is but another cultural construct defined by the majority.

In the 1960s, the Grand Union artists (Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Tricia Brown and others) uncovered new choreographic choices. That generation of movement pioneers introduced everyday, pedestrian, movement possibilities, often performed in unexpected ways, into the vernacular of concert dance. Dance performances were frequently presented outdoors, sometimes on the sides of buildings and many times accompanied by spoken text.

Today community-based artists are continuing to broaden the aesthetic palette of performance as they invite new populations into their dances. Dance makers are working with healthcare professionals, imprisoned men and women, senior citizens, disabled performers and numerous other unexpected populations addressing concerns originating from these communities. In this way, community-based art is giving voice to individuals that have not been typically served by creative endeavors. “The magic circle” as dance historian, Susanne Langer described the allure of dance in communities, is widening as more and more people are being invited to participate in the making and performing of dances.

Aesthetic upheavals, such as the work of the Grand Union in the 60s and the current community-inclusive dance makers, disrupt conventional expectations while suggesting new approaches to the making of art. This challenges audiences as they are presented with the results of these new approaches. Simultaneously, as choreographers continue to democratize the genre of dance, new issues arise. What does it mean to the viewers’ sense of artistic legitimacy and appropriateness to observe the untrained or unconventional performer in a dance work? Should there be different standards that assess this work? Do certain prejudices still exist, despite an apparent democratization of the art form, as to who is to be considered a talented performer?

"Disability and Contemporary Performance" addresses many of these concerns by asking us to rethink our assumptions about how to read the dancing body. At the heart of author Petra Kupper’s provoking discussion of disabled performers as movement artists, is a reminder related to looking and seeing. One of the major functions of art is the questioning of fixed ideas. These ideas, reinforced by the cultural marketplace, allow us to make easy generalizations about the everyday and everybody. How do our preconceptions of disability and dance influence our appreciation of the disabled dancer?

Disability is a deeply contested term used to describe individuals (or a people?) that are in a position of difference from a center.

The book’s content draws on theories from the fields of performance, as well as cultural and disability studies to question those assumptions typically linked to the disabled person.

In relation to disability, the main themes that are aligned with specific differences are tragedy, loss and dependency. Like people stereotyped by the structural meanings of gender and race, disabled people use cultural interventions in order to subvert and query these meanings, and disability culture emerges as a counterculture.

Kuppers begins her book with a discussion of “otherness” framed by the theories of Michel Foucault. These include the concept that all social organizations have “powerfields” that bind everybody together. Individuals who participate in these social systems are influenced by repetitive knowledge and daily actions that in turn inform behavior. At the center of every system is a point, “a blind spot” from which the “system’s organization is invisible, naturalized, normal." It is from this Foucauldian theory, that Kuppers contextualizes her investigation;

A study concerned with disability representation needs to acknowledge the structural issues of center and periphery. Disability as a discourse is secondary—it is the invisible, normalized, "blind" spot of the dominant, "able."

The cultural dictates of bodily norms determine which figures will be cast into the community of “other." Kuppers illuminates this idea with a historical overview of freaks in carnivals and sideshows as well as medical theater as a venue of public performance – a kind of foreshadowing of the disabled performer. The author provides an insightful discussion of the word "grotesque," offering one example of how the norm’s definitions of an ideal “is implicated in that which it attacks."

The meaning of the grotesque is constituted by the norm which it contradicts: the order it destroys, the value it upsets…the beauty and goodness it questions. The word "grotesque" makes sense only if one knows what the "norm" represents – in art and life.

"Disability and Contemporary Performance" juxtaposes these theoretical underpinnings with numerous examples of performance work created by disabled artists. Discussions of work by disabled solo performers, ensembles and video and installation artists follow as examples of how “they perform the mobilization of the ‘trapped body’ (which disability as discourse of tragedy enacts so powerfully in our society).” This mobilization by the disabled performer provides a critical contribution to the discussion surrounding many of the questions mentioned in this review.

Disabled dancers confuse non-disabled people’s concepts of what dance can be, what bodies are supposed to do, and what disability means.

Community-based artists continue to question and challenge societal stereotypes providing new insights into contemporary identity politics and aesthetics. Petra Kuppers' book is an important contribution to this field while suggesting new meanings and possibilities for considering the body in motion.

Stuart Pimsler is founding co-artistic director of Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater, based in Minneapolis, Minn. SPDT has toured nationally and abroad since 1979. Since 1992, Pimsler and partner Suzanne Costello have been collaborating with the healthcare community worldwide, presenting their Caring for the Caregiver Program. Visit the SPDT Web site for more: http://www.stuartpimsler.com.

Original CAN/API publication: July 2005