Working group conference reports (2012-2022)
2012-2022 CONFERENCE REPORTS
2012 Report
Pilot Meeting at the IFTR-FIRT Conference in Santiago de Chile, 2012 (report drafted by Yvonne Schmidt)
The IFTR-FIRT Working Group „Performance and Disability“ held its pilot meeting at the IFTR-FIRT Conference in Santiago de Chile 2012. Thirteen IFTR-FIRT-members from Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, Canada, and New Zealand and 25 Chilean students and practitioners attended the meeting, about 30 other persons who could not come to Chile followed our activities through our growing Mailing List and the WG blog.
The goal of this group is to have an international, interdisciplinary dialogue regarding disability and performance and to share scholarly work and best practices from around the world. Thus, we invited practitioners and researchers from Chile to our meeting who shared their work. Four presentations from Chilean presenters represented the state of disability and performance in Chile, including one presentation about Mapuche theatre that provoked interesting discussion about segregation and cultural identity. The paper session on the second day of our meeting featured five paper presentations, covering a wide range of a contemporary conception of disability in the performing arts: from performing arts with performers perceived as disabled, to the performance of disability in everyday life, to the mediation of disability to an audience.
During the conference week, the Working Group elaborated a WG statement and a four-years-plan and submitted the application to the IFTR-FIRT ExCom. One issue that showed up is the accessibility of academic conferences and research which will be an important goal of the WG. We also decided to discover innovative, inclusive forms of research, such as collaberative research through social medias and the internet, in order to make our research accessible for persons who cannot attend IFTR-FIRT conferences.
Furthermore, we touched base with a theatre group in Valparaiso that works on blind audiences, involving blind people in the artistic process. Seven members of our Working Group joined a day-trip to Valparaiso where we had the chance to attend a rehearsal of the theatre project „La Mitad Visible“ at Ex-cárcel Cultural Centre, a former prison which is an important cultural centre. The project provoked a fruitful discussion which will be continued. The dialogues with the Chilean people both in Santiago and in Valparaiso will lead into sustainable connections and cooperations in order to promote the exchange between academia and society.
Convenors:
Yvonne Schmidt (University of Berne/ Zurich University of the Arts)
Mark Swetz (Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London)
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2016 Report
Stockholm 2016 (report drafted by Yvonne Schmidt and Arseli Dokumaci)
Working group participants: Sonali Shah, Riikka Papunen, Margaret Ames, Ashley McAskill, Arseli Dokumaci, Colette Conroy, Kirsty Johnson, Yvonne Schmidt, Janet Gibson, Christiane Cyzmoch, Tony McCaffrey, Sarah Marinucci, Kate Maguire-Rosier, Marla Carlson, Molly Ziegler.
Our work group had a serious of presentations by group members, on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and we had a business meeting at the last day. Working group members’ presentations have focused on different aspects of the intersections of performance and disability genealogies, including dementia and verbatim theater; support structures for theaters and their ableist traditions; conversations on the experiences of pain and its incommunicability; working with actors with developmental differences; various actor training strategies that defy the norms of the healthy and ideal body.
During our presentations and discussions, various important practical issues were raised by our group members. One of them was the difficulties that non-native English speakers face when trying to follow the papers and the discussions. We have discussed what is at stake for the full inclusion of everyone in group’s activities and in order to mitigate such difficulties, we have decided to write down certain references on board (or in a shared word document), and also make sure that everyone is able to follow the pace of the arguments and slow down, or repeat where necessary.
Another problem raised was the way presentations were circulated before the IFTR meetings. Some members pointed out that there was not enough time for them to read everyone papers in detail and be able to prepare responses beforehand. One of our members suggested a custom used at ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research) of dividing everyone into groups of three to meet at beginning of conference for 45 minutes and provide one-page responses each others’ papers (=2 responses per person). The group members were sympathetic to this suggestion, and the co-convenors might consider applying this style for next year’s meetings in 2017.
We have also discussed the relation of our work group to the broader IFTR conference and the general panels, and the possibility of opening up our paper presentations to non-members of our working group. In terms of the overall conference and the venues, we have also discussed the importance of addressing the accessibility issues, including both physical accessibility and other factors, such as presentation time allocated to the presenters. For example, a working group member with a speech difference would have needed much more time to present and discuss her research with the group. For future IFTR conferences, we would like to talk to the conference organizers about the difficulties that particularly attendees with disabilities are facing because of the time limitations etc. It might even be worth to discuss if IFTR could install the position of an accessibility expert within the ExCom or the conference planning committee. Since our Working Group has built up a knowledge based on our experiences in the past few years, we would be happy to share our expertise in order to make IFTR more accessible.
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2017 Report
São Paulo 2017 (report drafted by interim convenor Tony McCaffrey)
Local artists’ exchange meeting 8th July
One of the important features of this Working Group is the meeting with disability culture artists local to the Conference venue and in São Paulo, due to the work of Yvonne Schmidt and local contact Paula Souza Lopez this was a particularly valuable and interesting meeting. This meeting took place at Teatro Laboratorio, University of São Paulo.
Paula Souza Lopez gave a presentation on her own work on audio-description and the collaboration with the Unlimited Festival, UK at both the London and Rio Olympics. Billy Saga presented on his work as a wheelchair using rap artist and film-maker. Marcos Abranches presented videos of his work as a dancer/performance artist with cerebral palsy. Fernando Bolognesi presented on his one-man show about his living with multiple sclerosis currently being performed in Sao Paulo. Pericles Silveira talked about his radio play which had won a BBC World Service competition and about living and working with visual impairment. Estela Lapponi presented on her work as a performance artist who crosses artistic disciplines and she presented her formulation of Corpo Intruso in her Anti-Inclusion Manifesto.
Working Group Session 1
Present: Tony McCaffrey, Sarah Marinucci, Lua Leirner, Vibeke Grølstad.
The Working Group had resolved in Stockholm to circulate papers prior to IFTR São Paulo. Despite the number of presenters unable to attend IFTR São Paulo the members of the WG attending made a new schedule to try to combine presentation, discussion and Skype participation of as many of these papers and presentations as possible and resolved to make audio and video recordings to circulate to the wider Working Group membership, some 410 on the WG Facebook page.
Working Group Session 2
Dance, Performance and Disability in Brazil
Presentation by Carla Vendramin with video on the work of Diversos Corpos Dancantes and work coming out of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. We were unable to establish a Skype link with Felipe Monteiro of Universidade Federal de Bahia - and we later learned that he had been admitted to hospital due to a complication in his condition of progressive spinal amyotrophy. Carla who is also a member of the Embodied Research Working Group of IFTR facilitated a discussion between her and dancer Lua Leirner, Eduardo Coutinho, professor of mime from USP, Silvana Bustos of Pontifical University of Santiago and Adriana de Moura Somacal of Sign Atores, and also of UFRGS.
Working Group Session 3
Political Performance and the Public Sphere: Theatre and Actors with Intellectual Disabilities
Tony McCaffrey: Not belonging but becoming: Theatre of Intellectual Disability in a Time of Intellectual Disability
Sarah Marinucci: Disabled Theater – Shifts of Emphasis in the Reception of Theatre by and with Professional Actors with Cognitive Disabilities
Vibeke Glørstad: What does cultural citizenship mean for people with learning disabilities?
Working Group Session 4
Deaf Theatre
Adriana de Moura Somacal of Sign Atores and UFRGS presented her paper
The theatre group as a space for the formation of the deaf actor and we were joined in the discussion of this paper by Mariana Schmitz of Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Université de Paris VIII St Denis who presented in the General Panel a paper entitled Contributions of Theater-education to French Sign Language learning and Deaf identity construction and who is now aware of the WG.
Working Group Session 5
Questioning Representation and Aesthetics
A discussion of her paper Bodily Symbols: Interpreting Meaning in Dynamic Contexts led by Jessica Stokes who participated via Skype from University of California Davis Lua Leirner then led a discussion on her paper and work as a deaf dancer between Switzerland and Brazil
Working Group Session 6
A discussion led by Lorna Sutherland via Skype from University of Alberta, Canada on her paper: Inclusive arts of dance and drama for youth with disabilities. We were joined by Mariana Schmitz from France, Adriana de Moura Somacal from Brazil and Hadeel Abdelhameed from Egypt.
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2018 Report
Belgrade 2018 (report drafted by drafted by Yvonne Schmidt and Kate Maguire-Rosier)
Working group participants: Andrés Aparicio (Chile), Riikka Papunen (Finland), Kate Maguire-Rosier (Australia), Margaret Ames (Wales), Yvonne Schmidt (Switzerland), Christiane Cyzmoch (Germany), Michael Stokes (USA), Tony McCaffrey (New Zealand), Dave Calvert (England), Benjamin Wihstutz (Germany), Jessica Watkins (Canada), Sirató Ildikó (Hungary), Jessica Stokes (USA), Maria Koltsida (Greece), Vibeke Gloerstad (Norway) & some guests (fellow IFTR scholars and a local Serbian artist)
In its seventh year, the “Performance and Disability” working group discussed 14 papers from working group members from 13 different countries. Topics included different aspects of disability and performance in particular cultural contexts, such as issues of stage representation of disabled people in terms of the logics of normalization, a dialectic of stasis and dynamism in media narratives of disability, a politics of “care” in the making of dance theatre, accessibility to theatres and art spaces for artists with disabilities, the conditions of inclusivity in dialogue with notions of clowning and play in working with actors with intellectual disability, the ethics of ethnographic research with disabled practitioners as well as immobility as a creative practice in theatre by artists with physical disability.
In addition to the paper sessions, we collaborated with Per.Art, a local integrated dance company, based in Novi Sad, Serbia, which was founded in 1999 by the internationally recognized choreographer and performer Saša Asentić. In recent years, the engagement with the local communities has been very important for the working group in terms of the expansion of geographical and cultural diversity in disability and performance discourse. We had the chance to see Per.Art’s production Dis_Sylphide, which was presented on 7th July 2018 at the Cultural Institution Vuk Karadžić as part of IFTR’s conference in Belgrade at the invitation of the Performance and Disability working group.
After the conference, six working group members contributed a co-authored article to the upcoming journal issue of Theatre Research International, focusing on the theatrical event from different perspectives. The experience of co-witnessing a live performance (or not being able to witness) and the question of how disability performance is touring (the necessity of mobility versus the inaccessibility of theatre spaces) provoked vibrant discussion and is currently leading to another larger publication project.
In view of next year’s IFTR conference in Shanghai, there was much discussion about access concerns and modes of future collaboration. Discussion points included inaccessibility of current conference both physically and sensorially (eg. lack of audio description), the necessity of an accessibility mandate and a conference access plan for future conferences, as well as financial support, and remote attendance for disabled working group members. Rising from our members' onsite lived experiences participating at the IFTR conferences in the past seven years as well as our concerns over our members' future ability to meaningfully attend the 2019 conference and future working group events, especially in countries where access becomes a larger problem, members present in Belgrade collectively drafted and sent a letter to the IFTR ExCom.
During our business meeting we had to elect a new co-convener because Arseli Dokumaci stepped back. Kate Maguire-Rosier from Sydney was elected for the next 4-years-period from 2018-2022. The working group wrote a thank you letter to Arseli, who could not be present in Belgrade. We also discussed our new working group blog (https://performanceanddisability.wordpress.com/upcoming-meeting/) which we will launch by the end of the year.
Since the conference, the working group have engaged in planning cluster meetings and joint panels for the remainder of 2018 and throughout 2019. These activities include the DisArt Festival in Grand Rapids/USA 16-28 October 2018, “Theatre and Internationalization and Barrie Kosky: Past, Present, Future” conference with Macquarie University and Goethe-Institut in Sydney/Australia, the final symposium of the "DisAbility on Stage“-project in Zurich/Switzerland April 2019, PSi 2019 in Calgary/Canada, NNDR: Nordic Network on Disability Research, Copenhagen/Denmark, and the CATR/ACRT Canadian Association for Theatre Research Conference, Disability Working Group, June 2019, UBC Vancouver/Canada.
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2019 Report
Shanghai 2019 (report drafted by Vibeke Glørstad)
Working group participants: Andrés Aparicio, Vibeke Glørstad, Tony McCaffrey and Dave Calvert presented the curated panel'Opening up and closing down the city' on Wednesday the 10th of July.
Performance and Disability Working Group also had a great and very productive meeting at the Amateur University where we met Shanghai International Deaf Film Festival (SHIDFF) founded by the filmmaker Sam Zheng. He met us along with staff from the Xuhui Community College Shanghai and Open University at Xuhui. SHIDFF first festival took place in September 2018 involving a full program of screening, performance, talks, workshops. The festival was also supported by the Deaffest in Britain. The organizers and the university are keen to building links with IFTR Performance and Disability working group.
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2021 Report
Galway over Zoom 2021 (report drafted by Jessica Watkin and Tony McCaffrey)
Working group participants:
Joseph Paul Hill, The Graduate Centre, CUNY, USA.
Patrick McKelvey, University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Akhila Vimal, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Riika Pappunen, Tampere University, Finland.
Suzanne Ingelbrecht, Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
Dan Graham, Independent Artist, Sydney, Australia.
Kelsie Acton, Battersea Arts Centre, London, UK, University of Alberta, Canada.
Jose Miguel Esteban, OISE/University of Toronto, Canada.
Becky Gold, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Alison Mahoney, University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Aleksandra Dunaeva, SASH, RANEPA, St Petersburg, Russia.
Ciane Fernandes, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
Ildiko Sirato, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest, Hungary.
Laura Purcell-Gates, Bath Spa University, UK.
Tony McCaffrey, National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art, Christchurch, New
Zealand.
Vibeke Glørstad, VID Specialized University, Tromsø, Norway.
Bree Hadley, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
Jessica Watkin, University of Toronto, Canada.
Summary of Session Discussion Topics:
This session happened over the course of a week and participants discussed many topics considering different aspects of accessibility, Disability, Neurodivergence, and how each interacts with the ongoing COVID19 pandemic worldwide. This session ended up considering how Disabled, Deaf, Mad, and Neurodivergent artists and their allies have adjusted to the pandemic situation, how performance for Disabled artists has changed out of safety and necessity, how care is working through this time, and what we as scholars and practitioners are learning from this moment in time. In addition to our scholarship-related discussion, participants raised concerns around accessibility for an online conference and using the IFTR website. Accessing recordings and other features of the conference were difficult for some and continue to highlight how accessibility is or isn’t working at the conference. Since access directly impacts the participation of many members of our Working Group, we continue to engage in discussions on how to support access at the IFTR conferences. Issues of access such as the captioning of Keynotes and panel presentations would benefit many, including the members of this Working Group.
After this year’s session, new projects emerged from Working Group members. Kate Maguire Rosier, Yvonne Schmidt, and Christiane Czymoch initiated their book project How Does Disability Performance Travel, an edited anthology to be published by Routledge which will contain chapter contributions from Working Group members Bree Hadley, Tony McCaffrey, Ciane Fernandes, Margaret Ames, Henrique Amoedo, Vibeke Glørstad, Akhila Vimal, Jessica Watkin, Felipe Monteiro, Yvonne Schmidt, Joseph Paul Hill, and I-Lien Ho. Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch and Tony McCaffrey, as a direct result of conversations and discussions at the 2021 Working Group Meeting collaborated via Zoom over 2021 and 2022 toward contributions to the forthcoming special joint issues of Global Performance Studies and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.
After this year’s session, new projects emerged from Working Group members. Kate Maguire Rosier, Yvonne Schmidt, and Christiane Czymoch initiated their book project How Does Disability Performance Travel, an edited anthology to be published by Routledge which will contain chapter contributions from Working Group members Bree Hadley, Tony McCaffrey, Ciane Fernandes, Margaret Ames, Henrique Amoedo, Vibeke Glørstad, Akhila Vimal, Jessica Watkin, Felipe Monteiro, Yvonne Schmidt, Joseph Paul Hill, and I-Lien Ho. Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch and Tony McCaffrey, as a direct result of conversations and discussions at the 2021 Working Group Meeting collaborated via Zoom over 2021 and 2022 toward contributions to the forthcoming special joint issues of Global Performance Studies and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.
Business Meeting Details
During our business meeting, we voted in a new co-convenor to lead the group as Yvonne Schmidt was stepping down from her tenure as co-convenor. As a group, we discussed how the model of three co-convenors would better fit the needs of our Working group as it considers a more equitable allocation of labour, and, more importantly, allows for a Disabled person to become co-convenor and feel supported enough to lead the group and offer support for providing and navigating accessibility for the conference. Jessica Watkin and Tony McCaffrey were then nominated and voted in as two new co-convenors to work alongside Kate Maguire-Rosier as the three co-convenors of the Performance and Disability Working Group.
New Scholar Award
Kate Maguire Rosier spear-headed the creation of the “New Scholars Award” for our working group specifically. The original application is attached to this report. Here is a short summary from the proposal:The New Scholars Award in Disability Performance would honour Yvonne Schmidt who is the founder of our working group, and who is handing over her role in July 2020. Yvonne has made outstanding contributions to our young group both as founder and convenor since its inception in 2011. She has convened and led our group for a decade, going above and beyond the usual tenure of 4 years. Finally, having co-edited a special international disability performance issue for the Journal of applied theatre and performance in 2017 and now spearheading an edited collection privileging voices from non English speaking contexts, it is irrefutable that decolonising our field is of great importance to Yvonne. It is therefore with great enthusiasm that I wholeheartedly endorse Bree’s suggestion and put it forward to you, as members of the IFTR Exec Comm. I would also like to acknowledge Tony McAffrey in workshopping the idea and logistics of this award. The first recipient of this award is Akhila Vimal, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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2022 Report
2022, Reykjavik – Hybrid: in person and via Zoom (report drafted by Jessica Watkin and Tony
McCaffrey)
Working group participants:
Yvonne Schmidt, University of the Arts, Bern, Switzerland.
Jose Miguel Esteban, University of Toronto, Canada.
Joseph Paul Hill, The Graduate Centre, CUNY, USA.
Bree Hadley, Queensland University of Technology.
Kelsie Acton, Battersea Arts Centre, UK/University of Alberta, Canada.
Margaret Ames, Aberystwyth University, UK.
Tony McCaffrey, National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art, Christchurch, New
Zealand.
Mirjam Kreuser, University of Mainz, Germany.
Vibeke Glørstad, VID Specialized University, Stavanger,Norway.
Felipe Monteiro, Centro Internacional de Pesquisas Artísticas e Acadêmicas sobre Antonin
Artaud,
Brazil.
Petra Kuppers, University of Michigan, USA.
Jessica Watkin, University of Toronto, Canada.
Julie Dind, Brown University, USA.
Elizabeth Motley, Marymount Manhattan College, USA.
Nicola Shaughnessy, University of Kent, UK.
Ildiko Sirato, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest, Hungary.
Elena Backhausen, University of Mainz, Germany.
It should be noted that in addition to the panelists in the room and online each Working Group session was attended by a number of other IFTR members who attended the panels and in some cases contributed to discussions. We are pleased to note that these in-person conference sessions remain a welcoming environment for all IFTR members that continue to contribute to the vibrant and inclusive community of the Performance and Disability Working Group
Summary of Session Discussion Topics:
Over three days and six sessions the hybrid conference considered themes of disruption, access, and the pragmatics of how Performance and Disability practices and scholarship can operate in the world amid the COVID19 pandemic. We discussed emerging practices of gathering and coming together informed by Disabled artists and their needs. We discussed how Disability Arts practices are changing and what they reveal for the future of Disability arts during the digital turn. The idea that “change is not progress” framed our discussions on the first day posed by Yvonne Schmidt, followed by Jose Miguel Estaben inviting breath and practice into the discussions. These two ideas flowed throughout our week together. We heard also about multisensory work, Deaf performance, Blind sports, Blind performance, somatic expressions, dance, music, current developments in learning disabled theatre and more. The hybrid model of our sessions worked well. Despite not having much technical support and Jessica Watkin being the only co-convenor available to be in person, the Zoom option provided valuable participation options for Disabled working group members. We did find that sharing our screens and sharing videos over Zoom was not always successful, and so have been discussing how to move forward with sharing videos of the case studies we are discussing in our presentations dealing with local wifi issues, and also how to integrate more access (audio description, captions) into our gatherings and exchanges as well.
Working group Projects in Development
“Collaborating on Togetherness and Futurity in Disability Arts” by Working Group members Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch, and Tony McCaffrey was published as an article in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and as a captioned video online in Global Performance Studies in 2022. The special join issue of the journals was awarded an Outstanding Editing Honorable Mention by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Working Group members Dave Calvert, Janet Gibson, Kate Maguire-Rosier, and Tony McCaffrey presented a 90-minute KeyGroup (keynote) Presentation “Collaboration, Care, and Conviviality” at the Performance Philosophy Problems Conference at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, 15 th -18 th June, 2022 which will lead to a future publication. Out of Time? Temporality in Disability Performance is currently with Routledge for publication. It is co-edited by Working Group member Benjamin Wihstutz and contains contributions from Working Group members Elena Backhausen, Nina Mühlemann, and Tony McCaffrey.
Business Meeting Details
Between the 2021 conference and the 2022 conference, Kate Maguire Rosier had to step down from her co-convening position with the Performance and Disability working group, and so during our business meeting we held nominations for our third co-convenor slot. Julie Dind, Brown University, was voted in as the third co-convenor of the Performance and Disability Working Group. This arrangement is advantageous in that it ensures a continuity of
succession of co-convenors. We also discussed the invitation from Brill publishers and the IFTR performance publication
series in terms of the possibility of the Working Group curating a collection of our work from this year’s conference, as we have had such a fruitful and wide-ranging exchange. This is an ongoing discussion with Working Group members.
New Scholar Award
The Performance and Disability Working Group New Scholar Award for 2022 was awarded to Felipe Monteiro, Centro Internacional de Pesquisas Artísticas e Acadêmicas sobre Antonin Artaud, Brazil.
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