Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. Petra Kuppers, Palgrave, 2011 (original) (raw)

Performances in hospices, on beaches and at the memory of slavery medicine, cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the United States, communal poetry among mental health system survivors, Butoh dancers and in video installations; Deleuzoguattarian aesthetics and playful rhizomes. Performance scholar and community artist Petra Kuppers engages these sites and practices as laboratories of experimental disability culture. Here, the possibility of new forms of embodiment, engagement and community take shape at the intersection of the past and the emerging future, in an embodied poetics that brings together movement, touch and language. Disability culture appears as a process, not a static definition, and offers seeds for artful justice work towards respect, love and an enrichment of the everyday. This book presents a senior practitioner's/critic's exploration of creative community processes sustained over more than a decade, and models the connections between arts-based research and research-based arts. 'In this book, Petra Kuppers – one of the most dynamic thinkers in the field of disability culture, disability arts and community arts today – provides a rigourous, sophisticated and strikingly poetic series of mediations on the processes, pleasures and challenges of working in this field. Drawing on examples of the way her own arts based investigations have evolved across a variety of sites, contexts and countries over the past decade, Kuppers positions disability culture as a continual process of negotiation in which people experiment with new ways of relating to the languages, cultures and histories that frame and inform their experiences. Emphasising the need to access the feelings, flows and energies that exist within and between dominant formations of community, Kuppers advocates for a rhizomatic model of practice in which personal, cultural and political histories come together in singular, specific and provisional ways to allow new formations – albeit at times fleetingly – to emerge. Thoughtful, thought-provoking and accessible, this book will be of compelling interest not just to scholars of disability culture, but to a whole new generation of scholars looking to use arts practice as a laboratory in which identity, community and culture can be creatively re-imaged and re-imagined. ' - Bree Hadley, Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Australia