Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship

Unconscious Performers

B. Hadley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137396082
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.

1
Weebles, Mirages and Living Mirrors: The Ethics of Embarrassed Laughter

‘What are you?’ ‘What is wrong with you?’ ‘How can you live that way?’ These sorts of questions, asked in hospitals, schools or social situations, put the diagnostic gaze that typifies modern ways of seeing, imaging and imagining disabled bodies into practice in day-to-day life. They are designed to draw people with disabilities into negotiations of their corporeal differences, and, in the long run, render their idiosyncratic bodies more readable, relatable and docile for spectators and for society at large (Foucault, 1976). As I indicated in the Introduction, these questions, these moments of questioning, are an ever-present part of everyday life for people with disabilities. In attempting to address a long history of oppression, disability theorists, activists and artists today almost all begin their work with accounts of these awful, awkward moments in which they become the object of stares or scrutiny. The moments, they argue, where they feel most compelled by social spectators to perform the role of the monster, medical specimen, cripple, charity case, malingerer, inspiration or whatever other personae prevail in the given context at the given time.

Artist and author Victoria Lewis (2006), for example, talks about the effect of this experience for people with visible disabilities. Lewis describes a moment in childhood where a group of bullies jumped from behind a hedge and started chanting ‘cripple’, instantly casting her as an object of pity (should she choose to accept this role) or contempt (should she choose to challenge or rile against this role). Academic Tobin Siebers (2008) talks about the effect of this experience for people with less visible disabilities. Unlike Lewis, Siebers focuses not on an originary traumatic moment in which he first knew himself as Other, but on the many trivial moments where he feels forced to perform his disability in particular ways – including moments where he plays his disability down, as he struggles through a social outing with friends who naturally head for steps that are for him difficult to negotiate, and moments where he plays his disability up, for gatekeepers such as airline attendants who will not accept a request for access to services without a visible sign of disability such as a wheelchair. Supervisor Deanna Fassett and student Dana Morella describe the very painful process by which Dana is again, and again, and again ‘outed’ as dyslexic, and then asked to define her invisible disability, describe it and defend its status as a legitimate reason for special treatment and services, as she seeks text readers and other resources to accommodate her learning disability while studying. ‘More than once’, Morella says:

I’ve been called an imposter, and told I was dishonest and unethical, that I was making a mountain out of a molehill, since not only am I an adult, but I am in graduate school… Time and again, this includes admonitions like, ‘You should be grateful just to be here!’ or ‘I never got to go to graduate school’, or ‘You got yourself into graduate school – what did you expect?’ and ‘Do you know that only a small percentage of people in the world even get to go to college?’ It’s as if, in asking for what I need in order to succeed, I am greedy or ungrateful. It’s as if I am spoiled, pampered, and spared from the ‘real’ challenges of academic life.

(Fassett and Morella, 2010: 148)

Morella goes on to describe the almost warlike tactics and techniques she uses to work through the challenges she encounters in the, to her, hostile and suspicious environment of her school.

Though the specifics vary, the situations Lewis, Siebers and Morella describe here are clearly all too common. I, as a spectator, feel a strong identification with some of their anecdotes and comments. As Lennard Davis (1995: xvi) notes, the questions, clarifications and accusations those of us who function as reluctant social performers encounter in everyday life are about much more than mere curiosity about their bodies, or confirmation of bystanders’ interpretations of their bodies. They are part of the continuing cultural labour of defining and policing bodies. Those with disabilities are confronted with probing and sometimes highly personal questions about the state and status of their body much more often than people who are part of any other marked or marginalized identity category. It could, for instance, be characterized as the equivalent of being asked to define, prove and defend one’s race, gender or sexuality not just on the occasions where one seeks to access specially provided services, which might be justifiable, but, say, every time one goes to enter a women’s toilet, or a shop, or even a public square or street. In these moments, people with disabilities are asked – by social spectators who probably do see themselves as comic, curious, helpful, or simply charged with maintaining value-neutral rules and regulations everyone in a given culture has agreed on – to perform their disability in specific, socially acceptable and socially serviceable ways. There is, as Lewis (2006) suggests, almost no way around this call to perform for many people with disabilities. Either they take up the role and the associations that come with it, or refuse the role, but, in the process, risk being assigned the more alienating role of the bitter cripple, or the malingerer with its even more problematic set of associations.

The artists I consider in this chapter all base their practices on these awkward, alienatory, but for many people unavoidable moments where their identity is called into question in public spaces and places. James Cunningham, Noemi Lakmaier and Alison Jones all begin their practice with some basis – albeit a very loose basis – in what Deirdre Heddon (2008: 7) calls bios or life story. They make pieces about diagnosis, medical devices, the daily process of accommodating architecture, furniture or other features of the landscape, or the daily process of dealing with the confused comments of others, because they themselves have experienced encounters of this sort. They are aware of the way the gaze at the heart of these encounters brings them power (to access medical institutions, treatments or liberties in social spaces), as well as prejudice and pressure to conform to social expectations about the way their bodies should be and should behave. They are even more acutely aware of the awkwardness, unpredictability and opportunities for embarrassment this constant need to negotiate their bodily idiosyncrasies can bring. What is interesting, though, is the way each engages these embarrassing moments in their work. Each of these artists avoids telling their story as an authentic, autobiographical narrative, summarizing the encounter, the embarrassment it causes, and the way it effects their sense of self – the theatrical equivalent of the stories Lewis, Siebers and Morella tell in their theoretical texts. They do not want to present these moments as their own individual problems for fear that this might, as Heddon (2008: 4) acknowledges, become an essentialized account of pain, prejudice or exclusion that fails to move, teach or make audiences think about discrimination against so-called deficient bodily identities. Instead, Cunningham, Lakmaier and Jones play out moments drawn from their day-to-day lives as disabled people – medical imaging, a momentary struggle to get a wheelchair around an obstacle, a comment called out while crossing the street – in a more abstract, amplified or metaphorized way. They confront spectators with images of bodies that are ambiguous, between two states, or in the process of becoming something new. Bodies that are, fundamentally, unfixed. Indeed, they present images that spectators might at some level relate to, if they have ever found themselves under scrutiny, had trouble fitting in, or been taunted in the schoolyard.

Most critically, Cunningham, Lakmaier and Jones present these images in live, interactive installation spaces. In Cunningham’s Mirage, Lakmaier’s Exercise in Losing Control and We Are For You Because We Are Against Them, and Jones’s Portrait of the Artist by Proxy series, spectators are very visible participants in the encounter. These artists demand what Helena Grehan (2009) calls activated spectatorship, as the spectator quite literally becomes an active participant or co-performer in their pieces. Spectators are asked to move around an installation space, interact with the space, interact with the performer and with fellow spectators, and, in Jones’s work, quite literally speak their thoughts on what they see. In this sense, spectators are asked to respond, and take responsibility for their responses, in a context where a whole host of people can see them doing this, either in the space itself, through windows that allow passers-by to see into the space, or through recordings to be shown to any number of people after the fact. The spectator is not drawn into a story on a stage, from which they can depend on a safe level of distance, but, instead, into something that is at once a performance and a very public re-enactment of a social process. They find themselves in a highly charged space in which their attitudes towards the fundamental unfixity of the human body are on show, and they are, at least potentially, embarrassed by, or forced to evaluate, the effects of their attitudes. This, in the end, is how these installations hope to interrupt, disrupt and intervene in the diagnostic gaze that is such a difficult part of the day-to-day lives of people with disabilities.

Bodies in becoming – Igneous’s Mirage

Illness, injury or accident has the potential to put any body in the position of being defined as disabled. Pain, paralysis and amputation can, as Elizabeth Grosz says in Volatile Bodies (1994: 71,72, 76), present a challenge to a person’s perception of themselves as an integrated, individuated, well-shaped, and thus useful bodily whole of the sort Western culture valorizes. Indeed, pain, paralysis or amputation as a result of an accident might be seen as more challenging than congenital disability as a person accommodates – perhaps all too suddenly – to a new image of themselves in the mirror, in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others.

In Mirage (2006), a performance installation by Australian company Igneous, dancer James Cunningham and multimedia artist Suzon Fuks investigate precisely this sort of shift in a person’s perception of self. Mirage – like past Igneous works The Body in Question (1999) and Liquid Skin (2005) – is based on Cunningham’s experience after a motorcycle accident in 1992 left him paralysed in his left arm, and on his subsequent study of pain, paralysis and the phenomenon of the phantom limb that is common to these conditions. The specific motif is the mirage-like perception of movement in a painful, paralysed or amputated limb that Cunningham experienced in a device called a mirror box after his accident. A mirror box is a therapeutic device designed, according to Cunningham’s programme notes, by neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran to provide the synaesthetic illusion of movement in a still or missing limb. The mirror box had a ‘profound’ effect on Cunningham when he encountered it in his research about pain, recovery, and the recovery of bodily movement in the wake of an accident.

Observing the movement of his intact arm reflected in a mirror, it was as if James could suddenly feel his paralysed arm moving again, along with perceived weight, joint articulation and position in space. A bizarre experience when one knew that in fact the immobile arm was lying flat on the table.

(Cunningham and Fuks, 2006a)

In effect, the mirror box mobilizes the same visual mechanisms that, according to medical science, allowed an individual to achieve bodily wholeness in the first place, to promote a continued perception of wholeness. According to Grosz (1994: 40), an individual’s body image is, like the broader set of body images that populate the Western cultural imaginary, based on both individual and collective fantasy. As an infant, an individual starts life as a set of undifferentiated stimuli. It becomes a subject, with a social identity, and agency, only when it is able to see itself as an integrated, individuated whole (Grosz, 1994: 273). This, according to psychologists, happens by means of a series of visual identifications with images of its own body, and other bodies, in what Jacques Lacan calls the mirror stage (Grosz, 1994: 32). These identifications are based on what Lacan calls a moment of (mis)recognition in which the infant mistakenly recognizes, relates to and aspires to realize an idealized images of wholeness, at odds with its currently much more muddied, disseminated mode of being. This (mis)recognition – like the social spectators’ (mis)recognition of the disabled bodies displayed in fairs, sideshows, freakshows, museums, medical institutions or the media – is productive, performative and world-making. It allows an infant to acquire a sense of what their body is, should, and should not aspire to be.

Obviously, theorists like Grosz argue, the infant’s acquisition of a body image happens in a specific social, cultural and historical field – which, in Western culture, tends to figure the able body as the norm, and the disabled body as mutant, monstrous, or to use more psychoanalytic terms, hybrid and unheimlich. The sight-based identifications that structure the mirror stage mimic and are mimicked by the sight-based identifications that structure Western cultural forms like the fairs, sideshows, freakshows, museums, medical theatres and other modes of performance. Both are characterized by performative acts of identification, interpretation and categorization that inscribe bodies and bodily characteristics with meaning, and bring them into what Emmanuel Lévinas (1996a) characterizes as sphere of the known and knowable. In this cultural field the infant aspires, usually, to the integrated, individuated wholeness of the able body. Its body image is, therefore, always already structured by the sexist, racist and ablest framework that articulates, and affirms, the binaries between one and other, male and female, able and disabled, that subtend Western cultural logics. It is this aspiration to wholeness – and the disabled person’s inability to achieve this wholeness they are taught to aspire to – that makes it difficult, both privately and publicly, for disabled people to accommodate the images by which Western culture defines bodies. ‘The disabled body causes’, as Davis says, ‘a kind of hallucination of the mirror phase gone wrong’ (1995: 139). The medical profession seeks to cure this maladaptation through surgeries, prostheses and exercises that help individuals adapt to their limitations, overcome their limitations, and even artificially create the illusion of bodily wholeness for themselves or for others. The mirror box, which uses a mirror image of a patient’s functioning limb to create the illusion of movement in the other non-functioning limb, does exactly this, to help the patient accommodate to their dysfunction. It is, however, a process that is ambiguous, alienating and empowering for the patient.

Mirage is a two part performance installation, designed to share Cunningham’s experience in the mirror box with spectators so they can ‘gain a first-hand experience of the illusory nature of perception, the “mirage” of the mind’ (Cunningham and Fuks, 2006a). The performance installation re-imagines Cunningham’s experience in the mirror box to interpellate spectators into it, and show them how their (socially structured) minds trick them into cohering multiple, fragmented states into a meaningful whole (Figure 1). It works with what Jennifer Parker Starbuck might call a ‘cyborgean’ (2006: 649) aesthetic, integrating dance, data projection, video, installation and other technologies to interpellate spectators into a mutable, plastic perceptual space in which parts of the body can be mirrored, multiplied, transposed and transformed. The images – though not ‘monstrous’ images of disability, disease or illness – are definitely striking and strange. They are reminiscent at times of a hall of magic mirrors that might be found at a fair, sideshow or freakshow, at times of the medical mirror box, and at times of medical imagery of bodies such as diagnostic diagrams, scans, MRIs and X-rays. Cunningham and Fuks describe the imagery as ‘a poetic anatomy inspired by molecular and neurological biology, particle theory, prosthetics, mutation, and dissolution-reformation of matter’ (Cunningham and Fuks, 2006a).

Figure 1 James Cunningham in Mirage, Australian Choreographic Centre, Canberra, 2006 (Photo: Leighton Hutchinson)

In the first part of the performance, the installation space is white, clear and clean. It is set up to look something like a sideshow hall of mirrors and also something like a surgical ward. Spectators are invited to look at themselves at mirror stations, quite literally placing them in a series of mirror boxes of sorts. The mirrors’ strange angles and surfaces swap one body part for another, or morph one’s own body into that of another, leaving spectators – at least on the night I attended – giddy, giggly and confused by these tests to their perceptual integrity. The experience, amongst spectators who have paid to be part of it, is ever so slightly awkward or embarrassing, in a light, community-building sort of way.

Although I have described this as the first part of the performance, the fact that spectators can pass through multiple performance cycles over the course of an evening, move about at will, and stay as long as they like, means these experiences in the first space sit as a sort of palimpsest over experiences to come in the second space. They enable spectators to relate both visually and viscerally to the mirroring and fragmentation Cunningham goes on to explore in the second part of the performance. As critic Jody McNeilly says:

For those willing to interact with reflective mirrors casting images and affecting neurological states of body disjuncture (enabled through instructed positioning of limbs and perspectives of vision), the ante-chamber of white generously prepares the audience member to wade into the black pool of this piece’s exquisitely constructed mythology.

(2006)

In the second part of the piece, the space is darker, more abstract and more ambiguous. Spectators are invited to move around a triangular pool of water with cords, cables, scaffolds and a six-foot scrim-covered triangular frame hanging above. These, and Cunningham’s body, become the canvas for the mirroring, morphing and transm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Disability, Performance and the Public Sphere
• 1 Weebles, Mirages and Living Mirrors: The Ethics of Embarrassed Laughter
• 2 Drug Deals, Samaritans and Suicides: Bodies on the Brink of the Visible
• 3 ‘That you would post such a thing…’: Staging Spectatorship Online
• 4 Same Difference?: Disability, Presence, Performance and Ethics
• Conclusion: (Dia)Logics of Difference
• Bibliography
• Index