Tony McCaffrey

Disability Performance : Art, Therapy or Exploitation?

This paper will concentrate on theatre performance involving people categorized as having intellectual impairments or disabilities and will make reference to specific video and audio examples: the work of the US director Robert Wilson with the autistic poet, Christopher Knowles, the work of Back to Back Theatre Company from Geelong, Australia and other contemporary examples of disability performance, including my own ongoing work as director of Different Light Theatre Company in Christchurch, New Zealand.

How do such performance practices seek to define themselves through their relationship with audience(s) and public(s)? What kind of public acts are these performances if we consider them as art, as therapy or as exploitation? If considered as art do they seek to confirm or question aesthetic and political assumptions about performance? If considered as therapy do they promise a form of healing practice for the performers and/or audience, or a kind of social therapy where normate society is reassured by being seen to include the marginalized and the other of disability? If considered as exploitation, who is being exploited? The performers by being exposed in a simulacrum of mainstream performance or the aesthetic of the freakshow, or the audience, encouraged to disable their critical faculties in favour of sentimental identification?

Are there other possibilities for disability performance which position such work more radically, transforming accepted notions of disability and performance for performers and audience alike? What might we gain from thinking of disability performance as a practice that creates its own counter-public?