Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and 'medical theatre' as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast...

Community Performance: A Reader is the first book to provide comprehensive teaching materials for this significant part of the theatre studies curriculum. It brings together core writings and critical approaches to community performance work, presenting practices in the UK, USA, Australia and beyond.

Offering a comprehensive anthology of key writings in the vibrant field of community performance, spanning dance, theatre and visual practices, this Reader uniquely combines classic writings from major theorists and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Paolo Freire,...

Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging--and the bodily access they imply--to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another's bodily experience and the effects--physical, emotional, and social--of medical procedures.In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and "knowledge projects" surrounding the...

A love story for crip culture! By turns playful, unsettling, raw and moving, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story is an immersive and sensual correspondence that builds and heats by accretion-one keystroke at a time. The dance of courtship is reflected in language that alternately snakes and darts, declares and obfuscates, reminisces and forges-finding freedom within its limitations. Cripple Poetics preserves and unfolds the artifacts of an original and timely love story that might otherwise have remained shrouded in a small, forgotten corner of cyberspace.

Performances in hospices and on beaches; cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the US; communal poetry among mental health system survivors: this book presents a senior practitioner/critic's exploration of arts-based research processes sustained over more than a decade - a subtle engagement with disability culture.

In this practical introduction to the study of Disability Arts and Culture, Petra Kuppers draws on a wide range of examples, exercises and activities to introduce the key artists and theoretical concepts in this diverse field. Comprehensive and accessible, this is an essential handbook for anyone interested in the disabled body in performance.

How do disabled people experience theatre, as both audience members and performers? How has the institution of theatre responded to disability over time? How can we create new spaces for performance and attend to different communities' forms of expression?

This insightful and engaging text examines the complex relationship between theatre and disability, bringing together a wide variety of performance examples in order to explore theatrical disability through the conceptual frameworks of disability as spectacle, narrative, and experience.