Prologue: Disabling the Theater

To be read alongside Arseli Dokumaci’s contribution to this issue, Katherine Zien’s article treats questions of ethics, affect, labor, and autonomy in Disabled Theater (DT), a performance created by Swiss performing company Theatre HORA and French choreographer Jérôme Bel. DT evinces traits of the artistic production of both contributors, yet HORA has made the piece its own by touring it around the world, for over 100 performances since its premiere in 2012. For better or worse, DT has become a signature piece for HORA and, in Zien’s terms, a “mobile social realm” offering a space where members of HORA can experiment with new ways of living and working together. The ethical and social dimensions of DT – and company members’ responses to them – have conditioned HORA’s expanded investigation of aesthetic and political control and collaboration that performance scholar Yvonne Schmidt examines in later productions. In addition to providing room for political and aesthetic exploration, DT’s mobile social realm can impact the communities in which it is performed. While this effect may not always be feasible in a festival setting, conditions at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada were such that when HORA performed there on March 30-31, 2015, questions of disability, autonomy, and access to the city rose forcefully to the fore. Reflecting on her feelings of productive discomfort around the 2015 performance, Zien seeks a response to DT’s fractured reception in a melange of concrete poetry and prose

Theatre Survey, 2016

This essay analyzes Jérôme Bel and Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater through a critical lens of disability by closely reading several of its Berlin and New York performances, drawing upon interviews with audience members and actors, and comparing the production with Bel’s earlier work, The Show Must Go On. Although Disabled Theater has been celebrated for aesthetic innovation and a bold, so-called politically incorrect embrace of disability, I argue that its aesthetic and affective work is coupled with and dependent upon a reductive approach to disability. The production achieves its force and audience interest by tacitly targeting the uncomfortable feelings many of us have about disability and then offering a fallacious sense of emancipation from these disabling perceptions and emotions. There is, however, an exception to this dynamic and outcome. Refusing to abide by the production’s otherwise normate perspective and expectations, Peter Keller’s individual performances offer an example of disability’s transgressive power and beauty onstage.

Transforming the crowds scattered throughout a performance venue into an aesthetic community demands that all persons present subscribe to a theatrical pact. If any of the participants lack the ability to contract, the form of aesthetic community dissolves into thin air. People with socially recognized disabilities as performers threaten to render the theatrical pact inoperative, thus disabling theater as an aesthetic event. Jérôme Bel’s »Disabled Theater« tests what happens when the decent collectivity of the aesthetic community is exposed to the risk of collapse. Employing the materiality of ‘disabled’ to a most unsettling effect, Bel devises a deliberately cynical trade with the audience in order to re-establish the aesthetic dignity of theatrical art under unlikely conditions. Rather than expect from Disabled Theater a warm-hearted lesson about how to integrate disability in a barrier-free society, we can see in this work the price of integration where it has been taking place: in aesthetic form.

Referring to Christoph Menke's notion of "Kraft" and the "Können des Nichtkönnens" of the artist on the one hand and to Hans-Thies Lehmanns of notion of "Nichtverstehen" on the other, this essay discusses the possibility to redefine Tobin Siebers term "Disability Aesthetics" in a different, more political way. Two recent productions, Back to Back's "Ganesh vs. the Third Reich and Jérôme Bel's "GALA" serve as examples to this redefinition that focuses on "aesthetic equality" instead of on "broken beauty".

Canadian Association for Theatre Research , 2016

At the March 2015 presentation of Disabled Theater in Toronto, eleven performers with intellectual and physical disabilities took to the stage to perform a series of dance solos set to popular music. The performance was directed by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel and produced by the Zurich-based Theater HORA, a professional theatre company that is fully comprised of performers with intellectual and physical disabilities. As a non-disabled choreographer, Bel had little difficulty articulating his artistic vision, thus lending credence to his position as the " brains " behind Theater HORA's performance of Disabled Theater. As such, it seems as though the performers were simply executing Bel's artistic ideas through the embodied materiality of their dance performances. This apparent divide between Bel's credibility as an established artist and the performers' relatively nascent capacities as dancers appears to be reinforced by the tension between the performers' desire to be seen as proper artists and the proclivity of the audience members to privilege an ableist interpretation of the dance solos. In turn, the incongruity between how the performers identify themselves as professional actors and the spectators' inclination towards a normative model of physical and cognitive ability presents a challenge for performers with disabilities to establish a sense of community with the non-disabled members of the audience. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's existential philosophy of community, as well as the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Fiona Kumari Campbell, and Robert McRuer on the concept of "ableism" and its impact on disability, I argue that any attempt at forging a meaningful sense of community in disability theatre performance would require both disabled performers and non-disabled audiences to embrace their common finitude as "mortal beings".

Different Light Theatre Company is an ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities who have been performing in Christchurch and internationally since 2004. Their most recent performance Three Ecologies of Different Light (2016) was presented at PSi 22 at the University of Melbourne, then in modified versions at an Inclusive Education Summit and at Everybody In, a Teachers’ Refreshers’ Course at the University of Canterbury. Recently members of the group appeared in a 90-minute film: Many Hats: stories from a theatre company (Paul McCaffrey, Stuart Lloyd-Harris) – part documentary, part scenes devised by the performers – shown in a short season at a local cinema in Christchurch. Where does this type of theatrical performance belong? Does it exist only for a specialized, localized audience as the above production history suggests, or can it have an efficacy that embraces a broader, wider audience? On what terms can actors with intellectual disabilities find a place in secondary education and the academy, physical and conceptual spaces from which they are in so many ways excluded? I wish to discuss these questions and investigate whether the radical efficacy of such theatre is in not belonging, in being continually unsure of the place upon which it stands, and from which it speaks. In the current political and educational environment being an intellectual seems to be about becoming disabled. What commonality is there in the struggle of the disabled intellectual and the intellectually disabled?

Theater - Yale School of Drama, 2013

The Theatre Times, 2018

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Forum of Slavic Cultures, 2018

The central point of this publication is to reflect on oppositional practices involving collaborative communities in art and culture. We propose to take into consideration the different histories and experiences of Europe while reflecting and contesting art-educational participative projects with re-) and dis-) integrative aims. This publication is an attempt to resist the conceptual and practical instrumentalisation of community work in art and culture, drawing upon different histories and experiences of European and Russian oppositional practices, without abandoning a critical stance.