From the Streets to the Stage: Disability and the Performing Arts

Author(s): Carrie Sandahl

Source: PMLA , Mar., 2005, Vol. 120, No. 2 (Mar., 2005), pp. 620-624
Published by: Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25486196

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620 Conference on Disability Studies and the University PMLA

From the Streets to the

Stage: Disability and the
permeates disability art and scholarship. Thus,
Performing Arts my own development as a disability-theater
scholar and artist frames my perception of
CARRIE SANDAHL how disability challenges both the practical
Florida State University and the theoretical aspects of theater studies
and points to the role universities play in fos
tering further development of the field.
Despite its newness, disability-theater In the 1980s, before the passage of the
Americans with Disabilities Act, I was an un
studies is an incredibly rich area of inquiry
that is exploding in artistic practice anddergraduate at the University of Puget Sound,
scholarship. The university is a particularly completely immersed in the theater depart
suitable site for a meeting of disability and the
ment enclave: I was involved in every campus
theater; after all, we theater scholars think of production, in every available position from
our classrooms and productions as laborato backstage props mistress to onstage per
ries not only for showcasing knowledge butformer. I was infatuated with everything hav
for producing, rehearsing, and revising it. As ing to do with theater. And, at first, I thought
the theater scholar Jill Dolan points out, livethe feeling was mutual.
performance, especially in the liberal arts set It wasn't long, though, before I began to
ting, has the unique power to test, on bodies feel betrayed and later paranoid: betrayed be
willing to try them, academic theories that are cause, as a third-generation feminist, I became
otherwise purely theoretical. The feedbackimpatient with the limitations of women's
loop that oscillates between theory and prac roles?girlfriend, mother, whore?that exist
tice in theater studies is necessarily changed to serve the dramaturgical needs of their male
by the inclusion of disability perspectives incounterparts, and paranoid because I never got
cast in those roles. Did the theater even notice
the classroom, research programs, and per
formance offerings. Interestingly, an underly I was a young woman? Even though I disliked
ing theme of disability perspectives is that the these roles, I desperately wanted to play them.
lived experience of disability is always alreadyBut I never played the ingenue or someone's
performative; indeed, many of us with dis mother or the bad girl. I was always cast in
abilities understand our disabilities as persome sexless part: the elderly female servant,
formance, not exclusively in an aesthetic or the old beggar man, the wacky sidekick.1
theoretical sense, but as an actual mode of liv My impairment was being put to use to
ing in the world. Consider what the playwright create meaning, meaning over which I had
and wheelchair user John Belluso told me inlittle control. I vividly remember my role as
a recent interview: "Any time I get on a pub the old beggar man, in which I was directed
lic bus, I feel like it's a moment of theater. I'm to make a long, slow cross from upstage left
lifted, the stage is moving up, and I enter, and to downstage right. During rehearsal I told
people are along the lines, and they're turningthe director that walking so slowly put me off
and looking, and I make my entrance. It's thebalance and was somewhat painful and that I
ater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we might fall. She replied that I should take my
as disabled people are constantly onstage andtime, that it would be OK if I fell, that fall
we're constantly performing." The perspective ing would just add to my characterization. I
of disability as performance undergirds anddreaded making that cross each performance.

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 i 2 o . 2 Conference on Disability Studies and the University 621

I felt the hot stare of the audience's pity?not DolVs House to The Search for Signs of Intelli
pity for the character, but pity for me. I could gent Life in the Universe?included characters
no longer tell the difference between the two. with disabilities and that these disabilities
I took as many women's studies courses as were significant to the plots and themes of
I could, since they provided me the closest crit the plays. I pointed this out to my professor,
ical framework for understanding what I was who said that if I wanted to do some research
experiencing onstage. For instance, I gained on the topic, I could present my findings in
a vocabulary for analyzing representations of lecture. I found at least three articles on dis
women in drama. But as a disabled woman, ability stereotypes in film (by historians and
while I could sympathize with the sexual ste social scientists) and a couple of studies of the
reotyping of nondisabled women, I couldn't "handicapped" in drama. This research led to
really empathize. I had learned that these ste the course's inclusion of disability analysis,
reotypes did not apply to me. Nevertheless, inspired me to create a short video documen
feminist theory exposed how particular bod tary on disability representation, and pro
ies come to represent particular ideas at par vided the foundation for my master's thesis.
ticular historical moments. In my senior year, Meanwhile, I was becoming an activist,
I wrote a research paper on the topic of media and I began taking advantage of all that a re
representations of disabled women. Little was search university has to offer. I worked part
written on the subject, and none of it from a time for the student disability resource center,
humanities perspective. I learned to rely on my devised activist projects with other disabled
own experience and observations while incor students, worked summers as a personal-care
porating research from other disciplines. attendant, and developed an annual disability
My frustrations with my department's themed film series with the support of a pro
onstage theatrical offerings only worsened fessor in the medical school and the director
over time. But offstage, my upper-division of the student disability center. I also began
theater studies classes reinvigorated me as incorporating what I was discovering about
I read feminist and multicultural plays that disability representation into my creative
showed me that theater could make change work. I made a choice to use my disability
instead of merely reinforcing the status quo. for my own meanings, not someone else's. In
I directed one of these feminist plays for my 1995,1 attended a disability-arts conference at
senior project. On graduation in 1990,1 went the University of Michigan, where I first met
immediately to graduate school at the Univer many of the scholars and artists presenting at
sity of Wisconsin, Madison, to study feminist this weekend's conference. The 1995 confer
and multicultural theater and to pursue the ence was an academic harmonic convergence;
questions I had about disability identity. disabled artists and scholars from all over the
My first teaching job was as a graduate country learned that they had been explor
teaching assistant for a large introductory ing in isolation similar ideas, but from differ
theater course that had recently been over ent disciplinary perspectives and in different
hauled to include multicultural perspectives. artistic media. Our coming together created
While Western canonical drama was repre synergy, an acceleration of ideas; my thinking
sented, the syllabus made room for plays by about disability identity, art, and culture devel
women and people of color. Furthermore, the oped more in those three days than it had in
professor analyzed all plays for their repre my lifetime. I discovered, too, that artists with
sentations of gender, class, and race. One day, disabilities were far ahead of academia and the
while looking over the syllabus, I noticed that mainstream art world when it came to theoriz
every single play on it?from Oedipus to A ing disability identities, bodies, and aesthetics.

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622 Conference on Disability Studies and the University PMLA
I mark April 2001 as the month when
mainstream theater and theater academics
officially took notice of disability theater.
That month, American Theater magazine,
the profession's premier trade publication,
featured a special issue on disability and
performance. The theater artist and activ
ist Victoria Ann Lewis had tried for over a
decade to get the magazine to write about
the emerging disability-theater scene, and
finally it had. This publication garnered
widespread attention for the featured artists
and academics and won a prestigious trade
publication award. The academic journal ar
ticles, conference-panel presentations, word
of mouth about disability performance, and
the growing numbers of disabled theater art
ists could no longer be ignored. And most
exciting now is that both mainstream and
academic theater is beginning to notice that
disabled theater artists generate new aesthetic
practices and theories, that people with dis
abilities are not just "problem" students or
audiences to be grudgingly accommodated.
I began this essay by describing univer
sity theaters as laboratories that can explore
theories about identity through embodiment.
I argued that disability identity is inherently
performative and that those of us with visible
impairments are unusually conscious that
we "perform" our disabilities to certain ends
whenever we're in public. I drew on my per
formances of disability as an undergraduate
and graduate student to illustrate how dis
ability exceeds many of the curricular and
aesthetic structures that have given shape
to the discipline of theater studies. As a per
former, I learned that my impairment always
signified, no matter what role I was playing.
I learned that my disability in many ways
trumped my gender, that somehow disabled
people cannot and do not perform gender
in ways that are legible to audiences, for bet
ter or worse. And while I came to recognize
that disability representations are ubiqui
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tous in drama, I discovered that I and others
like me are usually unavailable for casting in
these roles since we are weeded out of actor
training programs, whether through overt
discrimination, subtle forms of discourage
ment, or our frustration with curricula that
exclude us. Furthermore, when disabled ac
tors are included in conventional theatrical
productions, our impairments are put to use
dramaturgically, often without our input. As
a result of my embodied learning?putting
my body onstage as a theater artist, a student,
and a teacher?I came to understand that
for disabled artists to participate in theatri
cal structures we would have to change them
and that this change would enhance an art
form that purports to explore the human
condition in all its variations. I also became
familiar with the work of my disabled theater
predecessors and peers, whose work modeled
the revolutionary possibilities our perspec
tives bring to artistic tradition. My work as a
disability activist and personal-care assistant
linked my scholarship on disability repre
sentations to the urgent political, social, and
economic situation of actual disabled people.
This "laboratory" experience at the university
provided me the opportunity to consider dis
ability in myriad, generative ways.
By considering disability we expose the
normative biases out of which the art form
and concomitant academic discipline evolved,
and we uncover new alternatives. As disabil
ity theater pushes disciplinary boundaries,
the resulting scholarship and artistic produc
tion explore areas relevant to theater and per
formance studies, disability studies, and the
humanities at large. I would like to describe
some of these areas here.
Scholars are delineating the ways in
which disability is used as a dramaturgical
device to serve plot, characterization, and
theme. A disability studies approach links
these studies to actual lives of people with
disabilities. A study of disability dramaturgy
includes the r??valuation of plays written by
 i 2 o . 2 Conference on Disability Studies and the University 623
disabled playwrights, analyzing these plays in
light of the playwright's historically contin
gent disability identity. Such a project consti
tutes building a historical and contemporary
canon of disability performance traditions.
This process would also include the reclama
tion and study of disabled performers, such as
Sarah Bernhardt, and disability performance
traditions, such as freak shows. Additionally,
an examination of disability performance
events since at least the late 1960s in the
United States reveals their significant contri
bution to disability civil rights, arts, and cul
ture movements. Analyses of contemporary
disability performances explain these move
ments from the insiders' perspectives.
The analysis of dramatic literature, artists,
and performance traditions shows that disabil
ity always signifies symbolic meaning beyond
the fact of impairment itself. How disabled
theater artists manipulate these meanings to
their own ends, then, becomes important. The
presence of disabled performing artists nec
essarily transforms the media in which they
work. We need documentation and analysis of
these new artistic forms and an exploration of
how disabled artists' bodies and perspectives
alter aesthetic categories such as symmetry,
time, and space. Such a study would illumi
nate possibilities for transforming curricula.
Current actor-training methods, for example,
evolved to create standardized bodies appro
priate to particular performance media (think
of so-called ballet bodies, modern-dance bod
ies, ingenue bodies, and character-actor bod
ies). Many training techniques attempt to
"cure" individuals of idiosyncratic postures
and movement vocabularies and to replace
them with an artistic form's prescribed move
ments. Changes to curricula are necessary to
accommodate disabled students and would
affect other students with nonnormative bod
ies who traditionally have been considered
inappropriate to certain performance media.
Furthermore, experimenting in the classroom
and onstage with the movement vocabularies
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of people with disabilities complicates philo
sophical theories of performativity, or what
Judith Butler describes as the process of form
ing gendered and sexed identities through re
peated, stylized bodily acts. Disabled people's
bodies and movement repertoires force us to
reconsider what it means to "act like a man"
or "act like a woman."
Integrating people with disabilities into
theater arts changes not only aesthetic out
comes but also the process of creating theater.
Collaborations between disabled and non
disabled artists, for example, raise questions
about the nature of artistic collaboration as
an exchange between mutually consenting
partners, especially when the disabled artists
include those with cognitive or psychiatric im
pairments. Some of these collaborations take
place in medical or institutional settings, where
disabled people participate in dance or drama
therapy. Therapists are usually able-bodied
practitioners, and performers are situated as
patients in search of cure. These performances
are rarely intended for public presentation, and
when they are made public, audiences tend not
to view the works as authentic art. As more
and more disabled practitioners participate in
such collaborations, the status of such perfor
mance as therapy, rather than legitimate art, is
changing. Scholars and artists need to rethink
the boundaries between art and medicine to
take such work into account.
The university can support the work of
disability-theater studies, by encouraging the
kind of interdisciplinary research and proj
ects that served as impetus to the field's emer
gence in the first place. As a young theater
artist, I found my intellectual curiosity was
nurtured by the opportunity to go outside my
discipline to seek answers to my questions.
Professors can validate student observations
and experiences that contradict a discipline's
discourse and encourage students to enter the
discourse themselves rather than be excluded
by it. This requires the academy's willingness
624 Conference on Disability Studiesand the University PMLA

to accommodate difference with the attitude
that diversity generates new knowledge rather
than with the attitude that difference is merely
to be tolerated and reluctantly included. If I
had to pick the most important theme from
my account, it would be not that the university
oppressed me as a disabled person but that it
enabled me to develop as an artist, scholar, and
person. I was not shielded by political correct
ness and hand holding but, rather, pushed to
take advantage of the university's resources to
pursue my questions. The university can pro
vide a venue for students to network with one
another, since they learn as much, if not more,
from peer interaction as they do from formal
course work. In addition to being service pro
viders, student disability centers should be
hubs of disability culture, coordinating with
various academic departments disability
centered live performances, film series, art
events, and teach-ins about disability policy.
Like the artist who tests theory in the labo
ratory of the theater with each performance,
the university body can test theory through its
own performative institutional practices.
Note
11 did once play Miranda from The Tempest in an ex
perimental piece called "Shakespeare's Fantasies," a de
constructive collage of scenes from Shakespeare's plays.
Originally, another woman was cast in the role, but I was
recast after I shared with the director my disappointment
in not having had the opportunity to play an ingenue.
The scene lasted about ten minutes. Interestingly, Pros
pero was portrayed as a disabled person who used a small
wheeled cart for mobility. A tall, blond, nondisabled
woman was cast in this role.
Works Cited
Belluso, John. Personal interview. 2 July 2001. Los An
geles, CA.
Dolan, Jill. "Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies,
Performance, and the 'Performative.'" Theatre Jour
nal 45 (1993): 417-42.

In the session "Disability and the Arts," Riva Lehrer, of the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, discussed her project Circle Stories. Lehrer is a member
of the Disabled Artists' Network, and the idea for Circle Stories emerged
from her encounters with people in the network. Lehrer believes that the
participants she portrays must have control over their depiction, especially
since disabled people have felt objectified by many representational modes
(sideshows, medical textbooks). Her project to date includes fourteen por
traits, including a self-portrait that shows her disability (spina bifida) in the
same way she shows the disabilities of others.
Lehrer said that she used to remove her eyeglasses when she walked
around outside for fear she might glimpse a reflection of herself in a win
dow. She felt that her lurching shape was the worst possible thing she
could see. Part of her goal as an artist is to create a context for disabled
people to carry inside so that their visions of themselves will be situated
"amid an endless unfolding of human possibility."

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