Benjamin Wihstutz

Elena Backhausen

Noa Winter

Out of Time? has many different meanings, amongst them outmoded, out of step, under time pressure, no time left, or simply delayed. In the disability context, it may also refer to resistant attitudes of living in “crip time” that contradict time as a linear process with a more or less predictable future. According to Alison Kafer, “crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” What does this mean in the disability arts? What new concepts of accessibility, crip futures, and crip resistance can be staged or created by disability performance? And how does the notion of “out of time” connect crip time with pandemic time in disability performance? The collective volume seeks to respond to these questions by exploring crip time in disability performance as both a concept and a phenomenon. The book tackles the topic from two angles: on the one hand from a theoretical point of view that connects performance analysis with crip and performance theory, on the other hand from a practice-based perspective of disability artists who develop new concepts and dramaturgies of crip time based on their own lived experiences and observations in the field of the performing and disability arts. The book gathers different types of text genres, forms, and styles that mirror the diversity of their authors. Besides theoretical and academic chapters on disability performance, the book also includes essays, poems, dramatic texts, and choreographic concepts that ref lect upon the alternative knowledge in the disability arts.

Temporality In Disability Performance

Out of Time?

Erika Fischer-Lichte

From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space, shared by actors and spectators. As a result, its entity and history is intimately tied to politics: a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts. This collection examines what is at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place; it asks under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political. The book approaches this issue from various angles, taking theatre as a cultural paradigm for political dimensions of space in its respective historical context. Visiting the political dimensions of theatrical space in both theatre history and contemporary performance, the volume responds to the so-called spatial turn in cultural and historical studies, and questions a politics of aesthetics that is discussed in continental philosophy. The book visits different levels and linkages between aesthetic theory and geography, art and sociology, architecture and political theory, and geometry and history, shedding new light on theatre, politics, and space, thereby transforming this historically intertwined triad into a transdisciplinary theme.

Theatre and Topology

Performance and the Politics of Space

Sandra Umathum

Jerome Bel's "Disabled Theater" polarizes the public: on the one hand celebrated as an outstanding conceptual dance piece, on the other hand harshly criticized for being a contemporary "freak show." In either case, the production raises central questions on the role of people with cognitive differences in Western society, as well as on basic norms and conventions of theater and dance: Can a theatrical stage serve as a place of emancipation for people with disabilities? To what extent are performers with disabilities able to challenge and subvert the rules of an economized society, above all its performance principle? What would the training of an actor or a dancer look like without an ideology of ability? Do we need new categories of aesthetic judgment? The book takes "Disabled Theater" by Jerome Bel and Theater Hora as a springboard to a broader transdisciplinary discussion on "theater and disability," to a debate at the intersections of politics and aesthetics, of inclusion and exclusion, of virtuosity and dilettantism, of identity and empowerment.

Benjamin Wihstutz

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