Despite its newness, disability-theater studies is an incredibly rich area of inquiry that is exploding in artistic practice and scholarship. The university is a particularly suitable site for a meeting of disability and the theater; after all, we theater scholars think of our classrooms and productions as laboratories not only for showcasing knowledge but for producing, rehearsing, and revising it. As the theater scholar Jill Dolan points out, live performance, especially in the liberal arts setting, has the unique power to test, on bodies willing to try them, academic theories that are otherwise purely theoretical. The feedback loop that oscillates between theory and practice in theater studies is necessarily changed by the inclusion of disability perspectives in the classroom, research programs, and performance offerings. Interestingly, an underlying theme of disability perspectives is that the lived experience of disability is always already performative; indeed, many of us with disabilities understand our disabilities as performance, not exclusively in an aesthetic or theoretical sense, but as an actual mode of living in the world. Consider what the playwright and wheelchair user John Belluso told me in a recent interview: “Any time I get on a public bus, I feel like it's a moment of theater. I'm lifted, the stage is moving up, and I enter, and people are along the lines, and they're turning and looking, and I make my entrance. It's theater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we as disabled people are constantly onstage and we're constantly performing.” The perspective of disability as performance undergirds and permeates disability art and scholarship. Thus, my own development as a disability-theater scholar and artist frames my perception of how disability challenges both the practical and the theoretical aspects of theater studies and points to the role universities play in fostering further development of the field.
Writing on the Ground