- Care and Access Aesthetics and Politics
- Cripping Embodiment and Voice in Performance
- Cripping/Queering Performance
- Critical Disability Studies
- Disability Culture
- Disability-led Research
- Neurodivergence
- Sensory Access/Relaxed Performance
- How disability is performed (on stage and in daily life)
- The integration and (re)consideration of abilities in performance
- Enabling audiences and practitioners
- Disabling practice and theory
- The intersections of disability and performance studies
- Genealogies of disability and performance
- The expression of disability culture (disability and interculturalism)
- Physical, sensorial, developmental and psychological normality
- How representations of disability in the performing arts can be subverted
- Career opportunities and education of disabled performers and scholars
- Accessible research and practice
Performance and Disability
Performance and Disability WG aims to provide a venue for the sharing and dissemination of scholarly and artistic work, and best practices from around the world, which explores how diverse physical, sensorial, developmental and psychological abilities manifest themselves in all areas of performance.
KEYWORDS
KEYWORDS: Disability Culture
Disability-led Research
Cripping Embodiment and Voice in Performance
Care and Access Aesthetics and Politics
Sensory Access/Relaxed Performance
Critical Disability Studies
Neurodivergence
Cripping/Queering Performance
Generic email: performanceanddisabilitywg@gmail.com
Call for Papers IFTR 2025 Performance and Disability Working Group
IFTR 2025 | 9 – 13 June 2025
Online and in-person participation in Cologne, Germany
The Performance and Disability Working Group invites submissions for the 2025 IFTR Conference in Cologne. Inspired by this year’s theme of Carnival and its carnivalesque dimensions—Ekstasis, Subversion, and Metamorphosis—our working group seeks to consider how disability intersects with, challenges, and transforms the ideas and practices of the carnivalesque.
Historically, carnival has served as a public space that simultaneously celebrates bodily differences and marginalizes non-normative bodies. Its transgressive potential offers a powerful framework for disabled individuals to challenge normative structures and claim public space through performance. This raises critical questions: What does it mean to embody and subvert the carnivalesque as a disabled individual in public performance? How might the sensory and somatic dimensions of public performance serve as sites for crip resistance, joy, and community-making?
We invite papers, provocations, and creative presentations from scholars, artists, and practitioners. Contributions are encouraged to critically engage with disability and performance through the thematic lenses of public performance, particularly its liminal, paradoxical, and embodied nature. How does the carnivalesque—marked by excess, transformation, and celebration—interact with the politics of access, visibility, and crip aesthetics? How might the carnivalesque support, complicate, or undermine efforts to reimagine accessibility, inclusion, and the politics of performance?
Possible Themes and Topics:
● Subversion and Crip Metamorphosis: How does the concept of crip metamorphosis reimagine transformation in performance, moving beyond narratives of cure or overcoming to center disabled embodiment as a site of creativity, power, and resistance?
● Cripping Ekstasis: What does it mean for disabled bodies to “exceed” or experience ekstasis in (carnival) performance?
● Unmasking: How do the concept and practice of unmasking from Disability Studies unravel the power dynamic in public performance? How do performances by disabled artists use masquerade or transformation to explore themes of identity, stigma, or radical visibility?
● Queering and Cripping Carnival: Intersections of queerness and disability in the carnivalesque, from aesthetics to politics.
● Senses and Sensory Access: How does the sensory intensity of performance create opportunities to rethink access and neurodiversity in performance? What might a relaxed performance or sensory-friendly performance version of carnival look like?
● Mobility: How do disabled people move through and within public performances, and how are these movements represented, negotiated, or reimagined? In what ways do these performances challenge or uphold normative assumptions about mobility, access, and the embodied experiences of disability?
● Spatial Making: How do disabled bodies participate in and shape the spatial making of public performance? In what ways do these spaces accommodate, exclude, or transform in response to the presence of disabled performers and spectators?
● Histories of Disability and Its Subversion: The historical engagement of disability in public performance traditions across cultures and its subversion.
Submission Details:
Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted via the IFTR submission portal by 15 January 2025. Acceptance of abstract submission requires IFTR membership and conference registration through the IFTR Cambridge Core website at https://iftr.org
After submitting your 300-word abstract through IFTR, please also email a copy to the co-convenors, Tony and Hui (tony.mccaffrey@ara.ac.nz, hepng@gradcenter.cuny.edu), to indicate whether you plan to present in person or online through Zoom by 15 January 2025.
MISSION STATEMENT
The International Federation for Theatre Studies Performance & Disability Working Group was co-founded by Mark Swetz and Yvonne Schmidt in Osaka, Japan in 2011. The aims of our Work Group are to create international dialogues, partnerships and networks at the crossovers of disability and performance, and to provide a venue for the sharing and dissemination of scholarly and artistic work, and best practices from around the world – research and practices that explore how diverse physical, sensorial, developmental and psychological abilities manifest themselves in all areas of performance.
The “Performance and Disability” Working Group held its inaugural meeting during the IFTR conference 2012 in Santiago de Chile. Since then, the Working Group has had five productive meetings at the annual IFTR conferences in Barcelona (Spain), Warwick (UK), Hyderabad (India), Stockholm (Sweden), and São Paulo (Brazil) as well as several cluster meetings, steadily increasing its academic and artistic network around the world. Under the co-editorship of Mark Swetz and Yvonne Schmidt, a special issue entitled "International Perspectives on Performance, Disability, and Deafness” has recently been published in the peer-reviewed journal, Research in Drama Education in 2017. The special issue features the work of many of our WG members.
As part of our mission, we are open to any definition of disability or performance. As a starting point, we are considering how performance may disable those with abilities that fall outside of ‘mainstream’ culture. We seek to question ideas of normalisation, ableism, cultural inclusion and expression.
Some of the questions we want to consider include (but are not limited to):
Meetings: At every IFTR conference we will host formal presentations of papers or workshops of practice as well as pre-curated group discussions of papers. As some of our members may be practice-based researchers, we welcome workshop proposals that demonstrate your work. Details of these proposals will be included in our call for papers. We plan to have interim meetings or cluster meetings, either virtually (lifestreaming or Skype) or in parallel with another suitably themed international conferences all over the world.
Network building: We aim to continue expanding our global network of researchers and practitioners from all over the world. At every annual conference, the working group will meet with a local organisation or individuals that works in disability and performance to observe and share each other’s approaches and perspectives.
CONVENORS
Tony McCaffrey, tony.mccaffrey@ara.ac.nz Hui Peng hpeng@gradcenter.cuny.edu