The article interrogates the use of amateur and professional disabled performers in the emerging strain of performance practice known as ‘performing failure’.
Using Jerome Bel's Disabled Theater – a dance piece that features a company of professional disabled actors – as the basis of a broad, interdisciplinary discussion of performance and disability, this volume explores the intersections of politics and aesthetics, inclusion and exclusion, and identity and empowerment.
The publication is comprised of eight essays, two interviews, and 15 case studies of political theatre makers, and investigates the performing arts as a political laboratory of the present. It explores how theatre, dance, and performance reveal their essential agnosticism, provoking the potential to actively change society rather than merely serving as a cover-up for the dysfunctions, fractures, and wounds of society.