Disability and Contemporary Performance

Performance and disability

An introduction

The terms at the heart of this study, performance and disability, hold multiple, contested and partisan histories. Their meeting points in disability performance – performances by disabled artists – create unexpected encounters, fleeting moments, puzzles and unanswerable questions – above all, as I will show in these pages, these meetings are characterized by a flow of energy, and a way of being alive, that negates fixity. Fixes on the nature of disability, and on images associated with it, can become unstable.

There are many genealogies and origin-myths that surround both performance art and performance studies,¹ but as a starting point for my exploration I direct your attention to Baudelaire’s Paris, ...