Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge

Through an analysis of various disabled performance artists and companies, this book investigates core issues affecting both "everyday" and "art-framed" performances.Disability and Contemporary Performanceaddresses performances as social and cultural interventions, and as acts on the edges of representational categories and embodied presence. Disabled performers challenge established aesthetic norms everytime they enter the public domain. In their performance of their bodies, they upset ideas of "ideal bodies", normative beauty, as well as postmodern concepts of the cyborg, the malleable, extendable, non-physical body, and the body as spectacle. Disabled performers have over the last decades found their way into the mainstream art scene, using and subverting disciplinary categories, upsetting ideas surrounding art practice and therapy, professional and community work, mediality and presence.

Petra Kuppers is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant College and is Artistic Director of the Olimpias Performance Research Projects.