{"id":673,"date":"2018-07-01T15:40:35","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T15:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/?p=673"},"modified":"2022-10-28T15:41:04","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T15:41:04","slug":"juillet-2018-a-dance-that-draws-you-to-the-edge-of-your-seat-acting-and-disability-faced-with-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/juillet-2018-a-dance-that-draws-you-to-the-edge-of-your-seat-acting-and-disability-faced-with-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Juillet 2018 – A Dance that Draws you to the Edge of your Seat: Acting and Disability Faced with Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cSarah Mainwaring\u2019s\u00a0palsy turns the task of clipping a microphone into its stand into a dance that draws you to the edge of your seat.\u201d\u00a0 This is how the reviewer for theSydney Morning Herald<\/em>\u00a0described the tremulous and fragile gestures of a performer with cerebral palsy, who laboriously, in fits and starts of movement, sets up a microphone at the beginning of\u00a0Super Discount<\/em>, (2013) by\u00a0Back to Back Theatre\u00a0, an internationally renowned ensemble of people perceived to have intellectual disabilities.\u00a0 At the conclusion of a previous show,\u00a0Food Court<\/em>\u00a0she delivered Caliban\u2019s speech from\u00a0The Tempest<\/em>, \u2018The isle is full of noises . . .\u2019 in a similarly tremulous and fragile voice. As she spoke into a microphone (itself tuned to reverberate strategically) the sound of her voice was accompanied by the words of the speech projected in surtitles as animated text either rushing headlong or stalling, apparently (voice-)activated by the fits and starts of her distinctive delivery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work of Back to Back Theatre Company is, amongst many other things, an ongoing interrogation of the interaction between technology and performance (onstage and off).\u00a0 By considering the work of this company, and of\u00a0Zurich\u2019s Theatre Hora\u00a0, and my own practical research with\u00a0Different Light Theatre\u00a0, an ensemble of disabled performers in New Zealand, I wish to explore the following questions:\u00a0 Does technology facilitate, aestheticize or problematize an access to \u201cvoice\u201d for disabled performers? What place does assistive or aestheticizing technology have in how the transmission of affect and meaning is negotiated between disabled performer and (supposedly able) audience? What are the political, aesthetic and ethical implications of this interaction between the perceived fragility of the performer and the supposed communicative empowerment of technology? What is it about such performance that \u201cdraws you to the edge of your seat?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tony McCaffrey<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last 20 years, the development of technology in performance has made us question what is meant by \u201chuman presence\u201d on stage when the body, the voice and the perceived agency of the actor are not the core of the performance, but merely components of it. How is this reconsideration of the agency of the human actor affected by the involvement in performance of people with disabilities, many of whom themselves operate as hybrid bodies, making use of prostheses, wheelchairs, and speech synthesis machines? What are the aesthetic and political implications of the presentation of such hybrid bodies in performance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New aesthetic challenges and possibilities emerge from the confrontation of such performers with assumed norms of economy and elegance in movement, clarity of speech, and notions of agency implicit in certain types of virtuoso performance. The performance of people with disabilities faced with technology is political. It is so not only in terms of the specific politics of the perception of disability in performance, encompassing accusations of exploitation and expectations of inclusion or emancipation, but also in revealing the shared vulnerability and precariousness of the contemporary subject \u2013 a dis-ability or disempowerment that confounds the binary of ability and disability. Theatrical performance by people with disabilities is constantly in dialogue with \u201cnon-disabled\u201d performance: at times as mirror image, at times as\u00a0imago<\/em>\u00a0or distorted reflection1<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish to consider some specific moments of performance taken from the work of\u00a0Back to Back Theatre, an ensemble of performers perceived to have intellectual disability. These involve the performer\u00a0Sarah Mainwaring, whose disability is deployed in performance faced with\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0in confrontation with specific\u00a0techne<\/em>\u00a0of theatricality. At the end of\u00a0Super Discount\u00a0<\/em>(2013) she interacts with a relatively simple technological object: a hand-held microphone that she attempts to place in its stand. Her distinctive performance of this action raises questions of how technology may be used in theatrical performance to facilitate, aestheticize or problematize the participation of performers with disabilities. In the hands of a stage-hand, the clipping of a microphone to a stand might well be an unremarkable action, a kind of \u201cnon-matrixed performance.\u201d\u00a0(Kirby, 1995, p. 41) In the hands of Sarah Mainwaring the \u201cembodied difference\u201d\u00a0(Kro\u00df, 2015, p. 179) of her disability transforms that task into something remarkable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As spectators we see her attempts toward the completion of this action and the involuntary movements that, despite herself, take her away from it. We can clearly see what she is intending to do, what she is moving toward doing. In advance of its completion, we know the function the movements are intended to perform, yet her progression toward completing the action is threatened with its undoing. Her movements \u2013 both intentional and unintentional \u2013 seem to take her at times three steps forward and two steps back, and at times two steps forward and three steps back. Due to the fact that the microphone is switched on, we can also hear her struggle to complete the action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her performance of this action calls attention to itself, but it is pointing to both her inability to perform the action, and the theatricality of that inability. The spectator is caught between measuring Sarah\u2019s distinctive movements against a norm of simplicity, economy, and elegance \u2013 according to which criteria she would be found deficient \u2013 and in finding what is fascinating, beautiful and compelling in the embodied difference of her movements. The time she takes to (eventually) complete this action is different from what might be expected. There is a durationality about her actions. But how has this durationality been deployed in performance? It is a kind of de facto<\/em> durationality. Presumably, Sarah Mainwaring has no choice over the duration of her actions; this is how she moves. It is the particular theatrical dispositif <\/em>of the production that chooses to display her distinctive durationality in performing this action. In the time that they are not used to waiting for such an action to be completed, the spectator is invited to question what is being performed by the allocation of this task to Sarah Mainwaring: whether her \u201cembodied difference\u201d is being curated, displayed or exploited. Super Discount, <\/em>like much of Back to Back\u2019s recent work, invites such spectatorial anxiety in an interrogation of the processes of perceiving \u2013 particularly the perceiving of disability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One question that emerges is whether the encounter of Sarah Mainwaring and her distinctive habits of movement with an elementary object of stage technology is in some way aestheticizing her disability. This is certainly at stake in Jason Blake\u2019s response to these moments in his review of the production in the\u00a0Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>: \u201cSarah Mainwaring\u2019s palsy turns the task of clipping a microphone into its stand into a dance that draws you to the edge of your seat.\u201d (Blake, 2013)\u00a0Blake assigns grammatical agency to her disability. Her \u201cpalsy\u201d is an agent that transforms the basic task into a performance that both shapes space and time aesthetically \u2013 \u201ca dance\u201d \u2013 that is compellingly theatrical, that \u201cdraws you to the edge of your seat.\u201d This is, however, not the theatricality of physical virtuosity nor the virtuosity of the manipulation of theatrical\u00a0techne<\/em>\u00a0by the performer. Sarah Mainwaring\u2019s \u201cpalsy\u201d achieves such theatrical effect and affect by catching the spectator somewhere between anticipation of the completion of her actions and anxiety at the possibility of their failure. Perhaps the spectator\u2019s mirror neurons are tracing synaptic paths completing the action for her, while at the same time other neurons may be firing in empathy for her disability or inability. We may be on the edge of our seat experiencing both frustration and empathy, in \u201cthe paradoxical situation where the spectator feels (or can feel) an aesthetic pleasure by living an anxiety-inducing relationship.\u201d (Couchot)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, of course, an underlying irony in the exposure of, and aestheticizing of her disability in the performance of actions intended to control an instrument designed to facilitate or augment verbal communication. Her action with the microphone both reveals part of the hidden labour of performance and becomes a performance in itself, with the object in Sarah\u2019s hands taking on her distinctive patterns of movement \u2013 movement that produces sound, but sound that is non-verbal. This irony is typical of Back to Back\u2019s attempts to deploy disability as theatricality and to utilize and at the same time render problematic theatrical technology designed to assist or facilitate the communication of performers with disabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wider context of Super Discount, <\/em>Sarah Mainwaring\u2019s actions of placing the microphone in its stand at the end is both an undoing and a completion of an action she performed at the beginning of the production: taking it out of its stand, undertaken with a similar struggle and a similarly unexpected duration. Her distinctive performance of these actions, therefore, frames the whole narrative. The piece itself is a multi-layered, provocative and humorous investigation by four male characters of the comic book super hero, a figure who would be incomplete without their fatal flaw or weakness. Super Discount<\/em> questions the dis-counting of people with disabilities from inclusion in what is termed the community, and from aesthetic and political representation. The conclusion of the super hero strand of the narrative is a confrontation between super hero Mark Deans, a performer with Down\u2019s Syndrome who has a somewhat restricted access to spoken communication, and villain David Woods, a performer without disabilities. This takes place within the lo-tech minimalism of the mise-en-sc\u00e8ne in a simulacrum of a snowstorm on top of a table. Mark Deans vanquishes the villain by emitting an almighty roar of power into the hand held microphone, which amplifies and reverberates his non-verbal sound. He then stands in triumph astride the villain lying prone on the table. The affective charge of what follows is described in an online review by Grehan and Eckersall:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs the other actors begin to strike the set around him, Mark, our superhero, can\u2019t get down from the table. He calls to another of the cast \u2013 Sarah Mainwaring \u2013 for help. The fragility of our existence is captured in these closing moments.\u201d (Grehan, 2013)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Sarah Mainwaring offers Mark Deans her shaking hand to facilitate his descent from the table, a shift occurs from the previous scene of the confrontation between superhero and villain, characterized by Grehan and Eckersall as a \u201cmoment resplendent with theatricality and drama,\u201d\u00a0(Grehan, 2013) to what feels like a different mode of performance as Sarah Mainwaring helps Mark Deans down off the table, and, in the closing moments of the production, replaces the microphone in its stand in her distinctive way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back to Back Theater, Food Court<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Back to Back Theater, Super Discount<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While Sarah Mainwaring\u2019s actions are significant and remarkable, in the male world of the play they are also marginal. It could be argued that her role is marginal as\u00a0parergon<\/em>, defined Josette F\u00e9ral as: \u201cin the Derridean sense of the term to mean the frame, and consequently what in the subject is most important, most hidden, most repressed, yet most active as well.\u201d\u00a0(F\u00e9ral, 1997, p. 178) Within the context of\u00a0Super Discount\u00a0<\/em>this marginality as parergon is problematic, given the piece\u2019s division of labour and visibility in terms of gender: the men argue and fight the battles, the sole woman seen by the audience sets up and passes them the microphone. This marginality needs to be put into the context of the wider oeuvre of Back to Back. The company operates with an ongoing commitment to a small acting ensemble that are given specific challenges in different productions and, in addition, each production is in dialogue with the productions that preceded and follow it. The function of the microphone inSuper Discount\u00a0<\/em>and Sarah Mainwaring\u2019s manipulation of it connects with an earlier production,\u00a0Food Court\u00a0<\/em>in which male actors are more marginal: they conduct sound checks and operate boom microphones in a narrative in which female actors are the central characters, none more so than Sarah Mainwaring. She \u201cplays dumb\u201d through most of\u00a0Food Court\u00a0<\/em>but then at the end is given voice in a highly mediatized way that is important to consider in terms of the interaction of performers with disabilities and technology in performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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