The social experiment – Pranks, political activism, and performing stigma

As part of curated panel with Petra Kuppers, Bree Hadley, Patrick Anderson, Kirsty Johnson on "Contemporary Disability Performance: From Theatre to Social Practice" Disabled theatre artists in the Americas and abroad routinely negotiate precarity in and through performance. While panelists do not wish to romanticize the generative potential of precarity, it is important to attend closely to disabled artists’ productive negotiations with it. How, precisely, does performance move to social practice in these instances? Building in part from Shannon Jackson’s identification of the support structures of participatory art, the papers on this panel investigate moments when support structures fail, draw attention to precarity, and are recast through disability performance. Panelist Patrick Anderson will focus on performative navigations of cross-cutting institutions of medicine and “health” in the US context, particularly before and after the Affordable Care Act, and the inter-subjective “socials” that develop within and around them. Bree Hadley will investigate the phenomenon of so-called ‘social experiments,’ where people perform stigmatised identities in public spaces and places as a form of edgework, in which risk is always part of the practice. Kirsty Johnston will consider the recent work of Vancouver’s NeWorld Theatre as part of a broader investigation into the politics, aesthetics and infrastructures behind several targeted initiatives to build more inclusive professional theatre practices. Petra Kuppers will discuss speculative performance experiments, disability performances that engage version of slanted, cripped futurity, with a focus on breath. Drawing upon Afrofuturist guidance, Petra will engage a range of contemporary performance experiments in the suspension of precarity to address how performance methods can engage speculative bodies, encounters, and temporalities.