abstract
Everyday activities of real disabled bodies sketch out by negation the contours of an idealized, universal, and implicit Human Body. Chairs, stairs, doorways and doorknobs are all built for bodies of a certain height (that most, but not all, real bodies approximate), bodies that move on two feet and navigate by means of senses and mental abilities that work in perfect concert. Theories and cultural practices, no less constructed than built artefacts, implicitly assume a certain kind of body as well-- and in so doing exclude individual bodies that fall far from the normative ideal. The narrow range of bodies appearing on U.S. stages does not reflect an "average" American body, nor does it merely represent the result of commercial demands. Rather, it is evidence that the research, preparation, and training that goes into theatrical productions is often, like our built environment, designed for a specific, ideal performer's body.
Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, architects and contractors in the United States have been required by law to consider how the built environment excludes some kinds of bodies. In this selective survey of 20th century Western performances of the cultural or bodily Other, I will consider how theories of performance and methods of research by theatre performers might also exclude some kinds of bodies, especially those with physical or mental disabilities. Richard Schechner's seminal definition of performance as "restored behavior," for example, presumes that a performer's body is physically capable of restoring a full range of another body's behavior. Moreover, some so-called "anthropological theatre," especially the early cross-cultural work of Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski, naively assumes that bodily training can overcome linguistic and cultural differences because all bodies "know" in the same way.
Even when non-normative bodies appear in performance or in dramatic literature, literary strategies or production techniques that are designed for normative bodies can generate harmful misrepresentations of disability. Victoria Ann Lewis's study of the dramaturgy of disability suggests that in Euro-American drama, playwrights idealize the disabled body by exploiting disability as a moral symbol (e.g. Shakespeare's deformed and evil Richard III) or by framing it as a burden that the individual heroically overcomes. Nor does this invisible, idealized body only influence the way disabled characters are written. In plays about disability, playwrights often include a paragraph of stage directions indicating what the disabled body looks like and how it moves, because even disabled characters are almost always played by non-disabled actors. This practice-- as well as the paragraph of "character research" included in many plays about disability-- raises complex issues of how performers do or should research bodies very different from their own in preparation for a role.
Dwight Conquergood has hailed the concept of performance as an avenue for a return of the body-- in the form of bodily experience and embodied knowledge-- to academia. Since theatre and its academic cousin performance studies depend directly on bodies as a central tool or concept, interrogating the universality of the assumed body can greatly strengthen research, theory-building, and practice in both fields by establishing a foundation for considering bodily difference. The most useful advances for both practicing actors and theorizing scholars are occurring in the area of performance ethnography, where Conquergood, Margaret Thompson Drewal, and others have challenged anthropologists to develop a system of thinking about how people of different cultures embody cultural, procedural, and personal knowledge. A coherent account of how differences in bodies' cognitive, sensory, and physical abilities generate different knowledges can only strengthen such a theory of embodied knowledge. And those of us who work in the theatre as well as researching it would do well to consider research that leads to performance as a kind of ethnography, an effort to observe and also understand a different body's experiences and knowledge.