Performing Disability between Inclusion and Aesthetics (2009)

[Annual Conference / International Federation for Theatre Research – “Silent Voices/Hidden Lives: Censorship in Performance", Lisbon, Portugal, July 14, 2009 - July 17, 2009] Performing Disability between Inclusion and Aesthetics Fernando Matos Oliveira fmatosoliveira.pt@gmail.com Curso de Estudos Artísticos / Universidade de Coimbra http://www.uc.pt/fluc/artisticos “My body is a cage That keeps me from dancing with the one I love But my mind holds the key.” Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (2007) Abstract: Disability has been represented on stage in various ways, including theatre, dance and performance art. One of the main critical issues explored within the field of disability studies involves distinguishing between performative practices that are social and inclusive, and those that mobilise the alterity of the disabled body. Based on recent performances in Portugal and abroad, this paper surveys and analyses both representational strategies, not so much to highlight differences between identity politics and aesthetic pronouncements/experiments, but rather to observe how disability itself constitutes a category that embraces both corporality and discourse, aesthetics and identity. Disability has been represented on stage in various ways, including in theatre, dance and performance art. One of the main critical issues explored within the field of disability studies involves distinguishing between performative practices that are social and inclusive, and those that aesthetically mobilise the disabled body as a marker of alterity. I should begin by pointing out that, in Portugal, the relationship between disability and the performing arts has followed a trajectory that broadly coincides with that found elsewhere on the international scene, despite fewer projects. In the early stages, groups were trained within the institutional context to use theatre as a medium for communicative and emotional learning, with a view to enhancing the daily lives of disabled people. This use of theatre was not exactly inclusive, as it took place within a closed circuit, generally led by people who were not themselves disabled. It basically involved capitalizing upon the therapeutic virtues of the stage in order to mitigate some of the difficulties experienced by the disabled in their personal and social lives. Within this tradition, we might include groups formed within the various regional branches of the Portuguese Association of 1 Parents and Friends of the Disabled Citizen (APPACDM)1, and others such as CRINABEL in Lisbon or CRIARTE in Abrantes. Most of the companies that take part in the National Festival of Special Theatre (FNATES) fall into this category2. This event periodically hosts theatrical experiments aimed at the disabled community itself, without cultivating a more open dialogue with society or with the creative processes dominant in conventional theatre. It was Espaço t (‘T-Space’ - an association set up in 1994 to promote the social integration of the disabled into the community) that spearheaded the transition to a more open model. According to its mission statement, it aims simultaneously at therapy and social inclusion through two distinct two lines of action: “Espaço t operates along two broad vectors: firstly, the inclusion of individuals in artistic-cultural and/or educational activities so as to stimulate their expressive capacities and encourage them to invest in themselves; and secondly, the modification of attitudes, values and skills, thereby promoting a positive change of life style and developing self-esteem and positive selfimage”.3 Thus began the second phase of performative representations of disability in Portugal, characterised not only by the appearance of new projects, but also by the development of existing ones and increased contact with the international scene. By the time Espaço t organized the first edition of their theatre and dance cycle entitled Corpo Evento (“Body Event”)4, those involved had already had a certain amount of training and deliberately sought confrontation with an undifferentiated public. This was achieved by focusing on appealing subjects and selecting a programme aimed at a broader audience. This second phase was, therefore, more professional, aiming to reinforce the artistic abilities of the people involved. For example, the group CRINABEL has used concepts 1 Although there is a certain institutional coherence within APPACDM as a whole, the individual groups have their own identities and names, chosen for their therapeutic and prospective resonance. For example, the APPACDM group based in Évora is called O Imaginário (‘Imagination’), in Sétubal it is Grupo Alma Grande (‘Big Heart Group’) and in Oporto, Era uma vez Teatro (‘Once Upon a Time Theatre’). 2 There have now been 6 editions of FENATES (held between 2003 and 2009), organized by the Abrantes Centre for Child Rehabilitation. 3 http://www.espacot.pt/, last visited on 12th July 2009. 4 Cf. the official description: “On 26th June 1998, the play “Alcatifa” (“Carpet”) opened at the Ballet-Theatre Auditorium, directed by Joclécio Azevedo and performed by students of the Espaço t theatre workshop. This gave rise to the Corpo Evento Cycle of Theatre and Dance Performances. Since then, this cycle has taken place annually, and is presently in its 11th edition. It involves the public presentation of work developed in our theatre and dance workshops, and the establishment of partnerships with other institutions engaged in similar enterprises in the field of art therapy. Espaço t thus aims to demonstrate to the community at large that the physical, psychic, intellectual and social obstacles experienced by some individuals may be overcome using art as a privileged instrument of communication for personal valorization and social integration.” [ http://www.espacot.pt/ETp/corpo_evento.html, last visited on 12th July 2009]. 2 such as “artistic residence” to describe their work process, and produced creations that mobilise and adapt classics (such as Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka), stimulating reflection upon their own practices as well as disability-related questions of identity and politics. The new focus in the relationship between arts and disability is best illustrated by the group Dançando com a Diferença (“Dancing with Difference”), which was founded in 2003 on the island of Madeira. This group, which operates on a professional basis, has produced around two itinerant shows a year. It is characterised by a series of features that today define this area: it includes both disabled and able-bodied people; it cultivates links with the important personalities in the world of Portuguese contemporary dance, and, despite the specific nature of its origins, also aims at achieving artistic merit. In the words of Henrique Amoedo, who has led the group since the beginning, the “concepts of social inclusion and contemporary dance merge with the aim of demonstrating that dancers, irrespective of whether or not they have some kind of disability, may display artistic excellence in the dance performances they produce”5. Thus, disability stopped being perceived as a stigma sanctioned by the medicalized perspective on the subject, but instead has become a way of questioning and interrogating the representational norms and boundaries of the dominant corporality. The ultimate aim is to enable disabled dancers to be incorporated quite naturally into any dance company without the “condescension” that still accompanies the confrontation with bodies that have been kept out of sight, restricted to institutionalized and socially marked environments. Dance, of course, has certain particularities in this regard; as a form of expression, it is much less subject to the authority of verbal language than other related arts, and it also discloses the body much more emphatically. As the subject’s primary site of inscription, the body imposes itself as a vital perceptive apparatus: it mediates the individual’s entry into life and the fact that it grows old conditions its own understanding of historical time. If perception is a facet of the ordinary body, disabled corporality, for its part, obliges us to rethink these coordinates and their multiple dimensions. Dance is, thus, a privileged territory for the encounter with the identity and aesthetic questions that form the subject of this essay. For one, it enables the release and visualization of the imprisoned or censured body, while also activating an aesthetic metaphorization process of its own, which takes it beyond its material limits and enables it to invent its own system of signification. This ambiguity also brings risks for a choreographer working with disabled dancers. The group Dançando com a Diferença has regularly invited some of the most well-known 5 http://dancando-diferenca.blogspot.com/ 3 Portuguese choreographers to work with them, such as Rui Horta and Clara Andermatt, along with other names such as Henrique Rodovalho and Elisabete Monteiro. However, Rui Horta’s piece entitled Beautiful People (2008) reveals in its very name a certain attitude of affirmation that is typical of the able-bodied subject towards the disabled (despite the choreographer’s conscious purpose, as he has manifested publically); that is to say, it is an approach that signals a relationship of asymmetricality, which at times characterises the actions of nondisabled artists and facilitators. Rui Horta is certainly correct in his diagnosis that contemporary society is fixated upon the “media-enslaved image”6, which imposes superhuman standards of corporality. When, in Beautiful People, a female figure moves downstage and claims that she wants to be internationally renowned as a dancer, the audience comes face-to-face with certain prohibitions dictated by the normativity that is being questioned here and by the reversibility of standards of beauty. But the title, presented in this form, suggests that the choreographer’s role is to promote the affirmative gesture, as if delegated by the dancers that “lend” him their bodies. This is a very risky and ambiguous discursive terrain, but some of the paradoxes confronting the mediators of artistic creations for the disabled have been already identified by Giles Perring (Cf. Perring, 2005). Rui Horta’s work, therefore, may be situated somewhere between a normalizing strategy and another that is barely post-therapeutic. It is characterised by the professionalism of an ordinary theatre production and brings the participants close to the working methods and procedures typically used at the centre of the art-system. But full inclusion, in its most extreme form, presupposes the capacity to generate an alternative discourse within disabled corporality, one which is able to transcend the therapeutic archetype. Rui Horta (like Clara Andermatt, who created Levanta os Braços Como Antenas Para o Céu [“Lift up your Arms Like Antennae to the Sky”] with the same group) succeeds better in his attempt to rewrite disabled subjectivity, allowing moments of authentic “presentation”, in biographical episodes and figurations taken from daily life which present the raw crude materiality of disability. All dance involving the disabled body tends, therefore, to be contaminated by ambiguity. For this reason, special mention should be made of way in which the Romanian dancer, Romulus Neagu, deliberately avoided the wheelchair in the duet with José António Correia, a dancer recruited from amongst the internees at an institution belonging to the Portuguese Cerebral Palsy Association (APPC) for the performance Ensaio de um Eros 6 Cf. ‘Coreografar a beleza da diferença’ (‘Choreographing the beauty of difference’) in Jornal da Madeira, Revista Olhar, 29th March 2008. 4 Possível (“Rehearsing a Possible Eros”) (2006)7. Both dancers initially come on stage in electric wheelchairs and pause immobile for some moments before lowering themselves definitively onto the floor. They then spend the next 45 minutes touching, pulling and pushing at each other with movements alternatively brusque and drawn out, in a spectacle that is deliberately physical. Thus, the technique of contact improvisation is effectively rewritten, emancipating dance from classically-inspired virtuoso models. Without a wheelchair, the body of José António Correia moves and expresses itself in contact with the other, and vice versa. It is noteworthy that Neagu not only avoids using the wheelchair, he also rejects the prosthesis, with all its social connotations and compensatory dissimulation - indeed, the wheelchair is, for all effects, a powerful metonym of the disabled body. A quite different approach was taken by Marie Chouinard, the Canadian choreographer, who produced in bODY_rEMIX/les_vARIATIONS_gOLDBERG (2005)8 a veritable orchestration of prostheses, with the aim of exploring their communicative dynamics and constraints. This work thus places the disabled subject into a secondary role, engaging instead in aesthetic experimentations with the prosthesis as an extension of the body tout court to the music of the Goldberg Variations. In Neagu’s case, the absence of music and the symbolic gesture of renouncing prostheses are particularly revealing. For while language usually occupies a central role in the process of getting to know another person, in Ensaio de um Eros Possível, it is replaced by touch as a vehicle for understanding and communication. Indeed, the scene is completely dominated by touch and vision (duplicated by the use of video). In an interview, the choreographer has claimed that he does not have “therapeutic objectives” and that the only thing that interests him is artistic research into another kind of physicality: “Many people, when they see a disabled person, don’t know how to touch him or her. That’s why we decided to start off by touching ourselves”9. It could be said that touch therefore holds the 7 This performance opened on 28th April 2008 (the eve of International Dance Day) at the Viriato Theatre in Viseu, and was put on again two years later, in February 2008, as a co-production between the Viriato Theatre and the São João National Theatre, with the collaboration of the Viseu branch of the Portuguese Cerebral Palsy Association. It was conceived, directed and staged by Romulus Neagu, who also danced alongside José António Correia, filmed in video by Paulo Américo. In 2008, these two dancers were joined by the student Ana Isabel Gomes (at that time undergoing an apprenticeship) in the performance A Invisibilidade das Pequenas Percepções (“The Invisibility of Small Perceptions”). Unlike the previous work, this one included music, composed by Ulrich Mitzlaff. 8 This production was originally created for the Venice Contemporary Dance Festival in 2005. It was also presented at the Belém Cultural Centre in Lisbon the following year. 9 Interviewed by Mónica Guerreiro, Romulus Neagu declared: “In fact, my curiosity led me to search for another choreographic language, another type of physicality, something very different to what I was used to doing, having been so long connected to classical technique! How can you work with people that have physical limitations? (…) I don’t have very complex intentions, nor do I have therapeutic objectives: I’m just 5 promise of an encounter with the disabled body on equal terms, without the mediation of language. However, this possibility of a full encounter is once more undermined by the ambiguity of tactile communication. I will quote part of an observation by Jean-Luc Nancy on the indecipherability of touch: Each one touches the other without passing into it, and there is properly speaking no art of touching (not even a ‘minor’ art such as those for taste and smell), for touching is the sense as threshold (...) Touching is the light/darkness of all the senses, and of sense, absolutely. In touching, in all the touches of touching that do not touch each other – touches of color, traced, melodic, harmonic, gestural, rhythmic, spatial, significative touches, and so on the two sides of the one sense do not cease to come each other toward the other, acceding without access, touching on the untouchable, intact, spacing of sense. (Nancy, 1998: 83). The floor, in its horizontality, does not therefore derogate the difference that subsists in each dancer’s verticality. Touch metaphorizes an encounter in the exteriority of skin. To all effects, this performance is literally “rehearsing a possible Eros”. Before finishing, I would like to briefly mention two productions by the Oportobased theatre group, Panmixia. Unlike dance (which is irrevocably marked by the materiality of the dancer’s body and the expressive “corporality” that defines it as an art), drama, literature and film often use disability as a more-or-less opportunistic metaphor (cf. Mitchel & Snyder, 2006). Here, disability is occasionally evoked on account of its dissonant or even counter-cultural power. Indeed, since Antiquity, the arts have taken advantage of the counter-hegemonic significances accruing to disability, approaching the stigmatized body in various ways, which have been distinguished and classified in modernity. From the hunchbacks and lame figures of 18th century popular literature to the exploration of physical pathologies in 19th century realism, there is a vast gallery of examples of this alternative corporality. In the theatre, where the body tends to co-exist alongside verbal language, disability is generally presented via a character with physical limitations, or through modes of stigmatization that display disability as a mechanism of social differentiation. Erwin Goffman has shown, with great acuity, that all difference may be socially stigmatized. This is an additional reason for its recurrence in the civic arena (upon which theatre is historically based) and also justifies its mobilization by the performance arts in recent a performer looking for something to work on”. [http://fitei.blogspot.com/2008/02/romulus-e-ooutro.html 6 decades. We only have to think, for example, of the performances by Aaron Williamson, who is profoundly deaf; of the works of Cathy Weiss, or even of mentally challenged characters, such as Michal, in O Homem da Almofada (The Pillowman, 2005) by Martin McDonagh, staged in Portugal in 2006 by Tiago Guedes. The display of dissonance is precisely the aim of the performance Desafinado (“Out of Tune”) by the group Panmixia, written and directed by José Carretas in 2008. This consists of a succession of 30 small scenes, each focusing in a different way upon a dissonant state, a discordant existence, multiplying the disparities between gesture, the body, dance, music, writing and speech. The whole body diverges from language; all language diverges from gesture. The presentation clearly hints at the duality that characterises the objectification of the discordant subject: If I sing out of tune If I dance ungracefully and out of time If my writing is full of elementary mistakes If I paint without knowing how to draw If my drawings look like children’s scribbles If my acting is poor If my photographs are out of focus… …is it me that cannot express my meanings or is it my audience that is unable to understand them? From this mechanism and the reference to melodic transgression that gave rise to it, the performance explores the archive of dissonance through episodes, while introducing an affirmative element in favour of those that sing out of tune, as in the following quotation especially authorised by the Brazilian musician António Carlos Jobim: “In the chest of the man that sings out of tune /there also beats a heart” (cf. Panmixia, 2008). Although the production may lack a certain reflexive density or purposeful mobilization of parts, it is nevertheless one of the most far-reaching experiments on the subject of difference as sensory discord. Panmixia has also focused very graphically on the subject of disability with their 2007 production, entirely devoted to Machado-Joseph Disease, which is used in the title (“Doença de Machado-Joseph”). This pathology is very common amongst the Portuguese community of the Azores and their descendants. It is a neurodegenerative disease that usually appears after the age of 40; thus, it places the patient in a very unusual situation. That is to say, carriers of this particular genetic anomaly of Chromosome 14 only become disabled in the long term, which means that they inevitably know what it is like to live both with and without disability, thus inhabiting both sides of the mirror. 7 There are moments of great complicity and even humour in this work, such as a rather wicked association between the particularly Portuguese nature of the disease and one of its most well-known symptoms: David – Do you know how I know it’s Portuguese, this disease? Sara – What nonsense are you going to come out with now? David – We have problems with vertical vision… when we look up at the sky, we fall over backwards. Sara – Well, whaddya know?! David – It’s true! Now that is a truly Portuguese symptom” (Panmixia, 2007). However, with this exposure of the daily lives, fears and anxieties of this community affected by a genetic destiny that threatens their hopes and their freedom, what stands out most is their clear desire for symbolic normality. When Sara raises the issue of motherhood (a forbidden topic whenever both partners are carriers of the disease), David’s reply resonates in a way that is both ethical and profoundly disturbing: This whole shit is completely unfair, because I… I’ve got a damaged gene, for sure, but all the others are fine! (…) If you think that a son of mine has no right to live just because he’s going to turn out like me, you might as well say that I’ve got no right to live just because I’m like I am. (Panmixia, 2007). Perhaps the answer to this question can be found in the theatre company’s own name, which evokes a form of corporality created by random breeding. In biology, panmixia occurs when a species naturally breeds in a random fashion, favouring genetic mixing10. Thus, we might say that cross-breeding suggests an utopian aesthetics of inclusion. 10 The word ‘panmixia’ means ‘random mating within an interbreeding population (from the Greek pan – ‘all’ + mixia – ‘mixture’). 8