Volume 11, Number 1-2, 2025 Dramaturgies of Accessibility Guest-edited by Pil Hansen and Jessica Watkin

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A note about editorial transition within the journal and changes to the website.

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In this editorial, we position the journal issue between developments in expanded dramaturgy, access dramaturgy, and conceptions of disability. This is first done through an introduction to the basics of dramaturgy and accessibility. Dramaturgy enhances attention to how artists and audiences experience. In turn, this attention can be applied to consider whose strengths are placed at the centre of creation from the outset. When the strengths of people with disability and different ways of experiencing are embedded in creation methods and compositional principles with care, then sensory registers are expanded and disabling norms give way to accessibility. Authors in this issue advance such forms of embedded accessibility in their creative, educational, and research practices. Looking at what dramaturgies of accessibility become through these authors’ examples, we map the following topics: (1) awareness of how disability troubles normative ways of working; (2) working and learning with the people in in the room; (3) expanding ways of imagining, communicating, and sensing; (4) working with the aesthetics, ethos, and rigorous practices of accessibility; and (5) weaving and Re-stor(y)ing to produce accessible realities. Paying it forward, we invite readers/listeners to draw inspiration and partake in a growing community of knowledge on dramaturgies of accessibility.

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This article describes the approach to editing for access that was developed for the “Dramaturgies of Accessibility” issue of Performance Matters from 2024 to 2025. This approach was designed to be sustainable for independent publishers and strengthen a diverse community of knowledge. Sustainability is achieved by making resource-based choices about the forms of access provided and by distributing access work within a community while enabling each contributor to match their efforts to their capacity. This article shares examples of access guidelines for authors, kind peer review guidelines, and the practical steps of creating access materials. The authors transparently describe, and reflect on, their experiences editing for access to inspire other publishers and editors.

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Mad Conductors is a participatory performance that arises out of a desire to transmute and transform personal experiences of electroshocks and psychiatric memory loss. It is an exploration of electricity, shock, connection, memory (loss), and collective mad ways of being. What happens when energy is transferred? Who or what conducts the ensemble? How can we hold memory as a community? How can we hold the gaps? What resources do mad ancestors and archives offer? In Mad Conductors, we investigate and play with these questions through writing, movement, doodling, sound, and other mediums we invent. Our engagements have happened in community settings, universities, nature, and especially with people with lived mad experiences. Together, we work to create supportive spaces to tend to ourselves and each other while we imagine and experiment with new openings, pathways, and futures of care.

Our essay examines our collaboration as an embodied form of dramaturgy. While psychiatric memory loss can be (and often is) deeply painful, we also suggest that these experiences can point us toward new strategies for collectively holding and narrating memory. Accordingly, we structure our performance engagements not only in relation to our subject matter (psychiatric memory loss) but also in relation to the supports we need as mad collaborators to safely and joyfully engage this material. Rather than scripting a set production, we use our skills as artists to build a diverse range of containers, from participatory performances, university workshops, and house visits. While not necessarily conforming to conventional definitions of performance, we consider each engagement to be equally on par with the others; they are all Mad Conductors performances. The resulting project offers a flexible set of environments, actions, and modes of engagement, all while inviting participants into dramaturgical contact with mad forms of knowledge production.

In this essay, we weave photos, questions, and responses from Mad Conductors events with individually authored vignettes addressing our personal experiences as both collaborators and friends. Taken together, this divergent compositional structure reflects the nonlinear, fragmentary, and partial qualities of memory loss, conveying alternate qualities of mad experience in both content and form—what we understand as a mad dramaturgical praxis.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

In Mad Conductors we invite the audience to work together to make the performance with us. We wanted to do this project because doctors shocked one of our brains with electricity. Electroconvulsive therapy is when doctors run electricity through someone’s brain to treat their mental health. But it often causes memory loss. We both have memory loss from the ways doctors treated our mental health. Now we want to make these experiences into art. We want to make art for other people with these experiences. Our project explores many themes:

• electricity

• shock

• connection

• memory (loss)

• ways of being mad together

Our project also asks many questions:

• What happens when energy moves from one place to another?

• Who or what tells a group of people how to move?

• How can a group of people remember together?

• How can we recognize and live with memory gaps?

• How can the people who were mad before us help us?

• How can old documents and records of mad people help us?

In our Mad Conductors performances, we ask these questions through

• writing,

• movement,

• drawing,

• sound,

• other ways we make up.

Our performances have happened in

• places where mad people are,

• universities,

• and nature.

We work with other mad people to make our performances. As we create the performance together, we support ourselves and other people. We also try out new ways of caring.

Our essay talks about working together through the lens of dramaturgy. This means that we are interested in how stories are told. Stories about the kinds of memory loss we have experienced are often painful. However, we believe that if we tell these stories in a different way, we could create new ways for making and sharing memories. Even when we can’t quite remember everything perfectly on our own. We think about this when we

• create performances with community members,

• teach workshops for college students,

• andvisit friends’ homes.

All of these are Mad Conductors performances. We hope each one lets people experience the stories we tell in different ways.

In our essay, we share photos, questions, and what people said from our Mad Conductors performances. We also share writing about working on the performances. We write about many topics. We ask a lot of questions. We don’t have many answers. We hope that these different ways of writing remind you of the way we don't remember everything. We also hope that these different ways of writing let you experience a new way of telling stories about memory loss.

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The authors revisit how Deaf and choreographic languages were resonantly related in Carbon Movement, a Deaf dance-theatre work with vibrotactile interaction from 2023. Here, we return to the work through two alternating perspectives: (1) the spectator experience of a hearing, disabled dramaturg and (2) the collaborative creation process of the Deaf performer, Connor, and the hearing choreographer, Ainsley. The finished choreography offers a score of human-carbon relationship. The performer enters an unknown space, explores and shapes it with desire, is destabilized by environmental responses, and learns to listen with sensory and relational care. Similarly, Conner and Ainsley entered their collaboration with openness about what they each did not know about choreography, Deaf communication, vibrotactile technology/perception, and accessibility. Helping one another learn American Sign Language or choreographic language through creative exploration, they discovered movement-based and Deaf-centric ways of communicating, collaborating, and knowing together. These process dramaturgical discoveries were transferred to the compositional dramaturgy of the stage work, affecting the performer, the environment, and the spectators through an interactive, vibrotactile score that invites multisensory and relational perception.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

This essay is about making a Deaf performance called Carbon Movements. The people writing are Pil, Connor, and Ainsley. Connor is a Deaf performer. Ainsley is a hearing choreographer. Pil is a hearing, disabled dramaturg. A dramaturg is someone who helps artists make art that has meaning and makes people feel. People might see, hear, smell or feel performance. So, dramaturgy is about making meaning and feeling through the senses.

We talk about how signing, drawing, and feeling vibrations are Deaf languages. Signing and drawing helped us create movement. In the dance, Connor builds a relationship with the space. The space has a floor that shakes. When the dance starts, Conor doesn’t know the space. He explores it. There is black sand on the floor. He makes shapes in the sand. The floor shakes. The shapes disappear. Connor learns to listen to the space.

When they were making the dance, Connor and Ainsley also needed to listen to each other. Connor didn’t know about dance and machines that shake. Ainsley needed to learn about Deaf communication and access. Together they helped each other learn. They discovered ways of communicating, working, and making knowledge together. They made the dance in a way that values Deaf people and their lives. They shared what they learned through the dance.

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Through My Lens is a participatory performance collaboratively developed by writer/performer Amy Amantea, media designer and operator Nico Dicecco, and writer/director James Long. This piece invites audience members to describe photos to Amy, who, besides being the performer, is also the photographer behind the images. Amy is also blind, having a total of 2 percent vision in one eye.

This article incorporates written reflections, excerpts from a post-tour conversation, and text from one of the performances to explore three significant moments of interaction during the creation and staging of the piece: the first between Amy and the audience, the second between Amy and Nico as they developed a digital representation of Amy’s perception of sight, and the third between Amy and director and co-writer James, who continue to engage in ongoing discussions about the work’s function. At the centre of each exchange is a reflection on the power dynamics inherent in creating and performing a piece that equally prioritized the values of accessibility and exchange.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

Through My Lens is a performance made by three people:

Amy Amantea, who wrote and performed Nico Dicecco, who made the pictures in the performance James Long, who wrote and directed

In this show, people from the audience are asked to describe photos to Amy. Amy is the person who took the photos. Amy is also legally blind with only some sight in one eye.

This article is about how power is shared in a show that values access and the sharing of ideas. It looks at three moments to explore this:

between Amy and the audience during the show between Amy and Nico as they worked in rehearsal to create a digital version of how Amy sees the world between Amy and James who talk about what the show should mean and do

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In this paper, Jill Carter (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi) and Jessica Watkin (Blind) reflect on dramaturgical questions about care and safety in performance work they have witnessed or facilitated as scholars, educators, and dramaturgs. Their exchange begins by discussing Erica Violet Lee’s wasteland theory. Acts of reclaiming wastelands emerge as a meaningful framework to reflect on their experience with Indigenous and Disabled people’s approaches to pedagogy, art making, and relationship building. Carter and Watkin turn to Carly Neis’s In My Own Little Corner or Alex Bulmer’s Perceptual Archaeology: Or How to Travel Blind for more concrete examples of Disability performance practice and dramaturgy. The authors draw on these artists’ engagement with language, safety, revelations, reciprocity, and vulnerability to deepen their own reflection on how to build safer spaces with care.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

In this paper, Jill Carter and Jessica Watkin talk to each other. Jill is Anishaabe-Ashkenazi and Jessica is Blind. They think about care and safety together in two performances. The performances are

In My Own Little Corner by Carly Neis and Perceptual Archeology: Or How to Travel Blind by Alex Bulmer.

They think about:

Erica Violet Lee’s wasteland theory. A wasteland is a space, person, or people that a group of people decided should be destroyed and then forgotten. Erica Violet Lee wants us to remember and care for the people and places that are destroyed. She wants to feel sad and find hope for the people and places that are destroyed. In the theatre, thinking about the wastelands means that everyone deserves stories made for them. Everyone deserves stories told by people like them. How stories and language are powerful. Ceremony is a way people are changed. Stories and theatre can work like ceremony to change people. To change, people need to feel safe to share themselves with others. They need to do the hard work of understanding each other. Disabled artists imagine theatre the way it should be, not the way it is. Disability arts spaces need time, thought, and money to reimagine theatre. Everyone needs to be willing to learn and to act on what they learn. Everyone needs the courage to be with, listen to, and respect one another.

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How can disability arts and culture practices of access work toward a fugitive pursuit of care that rigorously dreams crip, queer, and mad worlds into be(com)ing? This critical-creative essay shares a choreographic narrative of my attempts to centre a rigour of care within the university classroom. Reflecting on my experiences as an instructor for an undergraduate course on disability arts and culture, we can enact a dramaturgical interpretation of my gestures of care by interpreting them as performances of failure. Oriented through practices of disability dramaturgy and abolitionist traditions of black study, these embodied forms of narrative and improvisational inquiry attempt to reencounter my practice of “sharing in draft”—an access practice that attempts to extend radical compassion to my/our mad movements through anxiety and depression. In doing so, we can reinterpret crip, queer, and mad gestures of failure as creative moments of fugitive improvisation.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

I write about teaching a disability arts and culture class in a university. I dance and write from the dancing. I feel and move my body. Those feelings and movements help me remember stories of caring for my students. I move and I think about sharing in draft. Sharing in draft is an access practice. Access practices are the actions we do to get what we need in different spaces. Sharing in draft means what I share isn’t finished and doesn’t have to be perfect. Sharing in draft helps me with what I need because of my anxiety and depression. Sharing in draft reminds me that nothing I say or do is final. I can always try again. This reminder helps me when I experience failure as a teacher. It also helps my students. Failure is something that we are taught to avoid in the university. Failure can also show us when we are not getting the support we need. This helps me to understand that sharing in draft can also be a fugitive practice. Fugitive practice means how you get away. When we recognize that a space like the university classroom is not giving us what we need, practices of fugitive access are the things we do to get away from those spaces. Practices of fugitive access are also the things that we do to create different spaces where we can get what we need by caring for ourselves and for each other.

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This essay discusses accessibility, community, bodily pain, and writing engagement, as well as meanings of “dramaturgy” in somatic and improvisation contexts. We work together as tender bodymindspirits—never just one, always interwoven—in complex inner and outer worlds. As a group of people working together, we use writing to find paths for witnessing experience. We created performances for and with each other. These are all small practices, often enacted in public, but not through spectacular performance. Instead, our work here draws on specific networks nourished through friendship and community—in the first case, the local circle of a small town in Michigan; in the second, the circle of disability-interested scholars in the Canadian East.

Plain language abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

This is writing about

I’m Petra Kuppers, the main writer. I think about my own pain and making art when life is full of pain. I think about dramaturgy in caring for one another and moving together. Dramaturgy is a way of making meaning and making people feel. There are also two groups of artists in this essay. These two groups of artists share stories about making art together. I don’t write about the artists’ stories. I just share them so you can feel and think about making art together. The first set of stories is about a group of disabled people who met in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA. Many people in this group live with pain. The second set of stories is about artists who work in universities. The artists meet in Toronto, Canada. We use movement, sound, and thinking deeply to make art about

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This article presents case findings from the ongoing Together Research project based in Boorloo/Perth (Western Australia). This co-designed and participatory project is led by artists and researchers of the creative My Studio program at My Place, an organization that supports people living with disability. The project investigates the evolving practices of substantive equality and agency in the Australian arts sector. We do this through workshops that explore concepts of genuine equity for disabled artists, creative control taken by disabled artists, and empowered collaboration with nondisabled allied artists.

Here, we first discuss My Studio and then focus on a specific workshop called Movement Together, which was led by My Studio artists in partnership with STRUT Dance in 2024. The workshop facilitated peer-to-peer exchange, accessible co-creation, and dance improvisation involving twelve nondisabled dance artists and eight artists living with disabilities. Co-facilitated by artists Julia Hales and Sam Fox, the workshop served as a platform for interrogating the values, ethics, and methods of the Together Research project.

We reflect on the experiences of the Movement Together workshop and envision future implementations of core principles regarding movement creation and dramaturgical approaches to directing that are accessible, collaborative, and disability-led, addressing the distinct area of disadvantage for artists who have not had access to tertiary training due to the barriers of accessibility. The core principles we have developed, which contribute to what Alison Kopit, Ann Marie Dorr, and Maggie Bridger name “access dramaturgy,” emphasize in particular how accessibility means little without creative agency and substantive equality for people living with disability, particularly if attempts to dislodge systemic advantage for the “majority” are not actively made. The findings and examples provided here have been generated with the broader performing arts industry in mind, offering direct and actionable statements made developed by the Together Research artists.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

The Together Research is led by artists and researchers at the My Studio program at My Place. My Place is an organization that supports people living with disability. The Together Research wants artists with disabilities to

have access to the arts, be treated fairly, have control over their work.

This essay is about the Movement Together workshop. STRUT Dance created the Movement Together Workshop. Julia Hales and Sam Fox ran the workshop. They used improvisation, where people dance and don’t decide how to move ahead of time. There were eight nondisabled artists and eight artists living with disabilities. Both nondisabled artists living with disabilities led the creation. The workshop was a way of figuring out artists’ shared values. This essay shares what happened at the workshop. We also think about

access dramaturgy, the idea that access should be part of the process of making art; and how access doesn’t mean anything unless disabled artists have control and choices.

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This paper is about doing research with artists with learning disabilities and autism. Artists with learning disabilities or autism need to say yes to doing research. Researchers need to explain what will happen in the research. Often, researchers think that people with learning disabilities and autism can’t say yes to being part of research. This means researchers don’t study things that are important to people with learning disabilities and autism. So, people with learning disabilities and autism don’t get a voice. All the people who wrote this work on I’m Me. I’m Me was a research project that works with seven learning disability arts companies in the United Kingdom. We used drama, dance, music and art to understand identity, representation, and voice. This paper explores our approach to ethics on the project. We wanted to avoid what we describe as a “deficit model” of ethics. Instead we worked with learning disabled artists and researchers to develop a set of rights in research. How these rights were communicated was very important in order to ensure access and understanding. I’m Me used a range of methods, including illustrations, workshops, videos, and movement. As a result of this approach, we found artists started independently talking about their rights in research.

Plain text abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

This paper is about doing research with artists with learning disabilities and autism. Artists with learning disabilities or autism need to say yes to doing research. So researchers need to explain what will happen in the research. Often, researchers think that people with learning disabilities and autism can’t say yes to being part of research. This means researchers don’t study things that are important to people with learning disabilities and autism. So, people with learning disabilities and autism don’t get a voice.

All the people who wrote this work on I’m Me. I’m Me was a research project that works with seven learning disability arts companies in the United Kingdom. We used drama, dance, music and art to understand identity, representation, and voice.

We wanted to make sure the artists could decide if they wanted to be a part of the research. To do this we

assumed that people with learning disabilities and autism can be a part of research, assumed that people with learning disabilities and autism have rights in research, and did not assume that people with learning disabilities and autism need to be protected.

Practically, we used

plain language, pictures,

We found:

Making sure artists knew their rights took time. We needed to talk about artists’ rights several times. But artists understood their rights better when they talked about them more. Giving artists credit for their work is important. But making sure that people reading research don’t know who the research is about is also important. We found it hard to explain when artists’ names would and wouldn’t be used. We needed to experiment to find the best way.

Learning how to give people with learning disabilities and autism the information they need to decide if they want to be part of research is important.

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Dramaturgy for plays featuring scripts developed with deaf actors, or by deaf playwrights, brings a layered and complex set of considerations about increasing accessibility in theatre productions for the cast, crew, and audience. These considerations include (1) making deliberate decisions about the languages the actors use; (2) addressing linguistic repertoires of the audience; (3) supporting or expanding sensory repertoires; (4) discussing the role of technology; and (5) incorporating deaf themes that are rarely known or understood by nondeaf audiences. Using a deaf aesthetics theoretical lens, the article explores dramaturgical decisions made by deaf playwrights, directors, and performers regarding four theatre and dance theatre works that were produced or are in progress in midwestern Canada between 2020 and 2025. The article also provides a performance ethnography of a staged reading for a script in progress developed by a deaf-led team of actors, a director, and a playwright. The performance ethnography relies on data collected from multiple sources: imagination-based activities resulting in artwork; steps within an adapted playbuilding model; video recordings of workshop sessions; the devised script; a video of the staged reading; and interviews with the deaf research team and participants. The data indicates that deaf aesthetics theatre practices drive accessibility strategies which are interwoven into the script.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

Dramaturgy is a way of making meaning and making people feel. People might see, hear, smell, or feel performance. So, dramaturgy is about making meaning and feeling through the senses. Dramaturgs are the people responsible for dramaturgy. When dramaturgs work on plays with deaf actors or with deaf writers they need to think about access. They must think about:

The language the actors use. Will the actors speak or sign? The language the audience uses. Do they speak or sign? How many other languages do they use? How to help the audience use more than one sense. Will the play ask the audience to see as much as listen? How to use technology to increase access. How to explain the deaf experience to nondeaf audiences.

This writing talks about four plays from midwestern Canada. These plays all took place in the last five years. We study a reading of a script a deaf playwright is working on with a team that is led by deaf people. We look at

art made to develop the script, video of workshops, the script, video of a reading, and interviews with the deaf researchers and artists.

We think about these things with deaf aesthetics theory. Deaf aesthetics theory says that deaf people should teach and make art for other deaf people. It also says art for deaf people should think about seeing and touching more than hearing. We found that deaf theatre makers don’t add access. Deaf theatre makers put access in the script from the start.

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This article focuses on the challenges that the integration of audio description (hereafter AD) into contemporary choreography provides, by analyzing two artistic processes and their applied solutions. The examined examples described here took place in the residency Creazioni Accessibili (Accessible Creations) in Rome/Italy. This residency features Giuseppe Comuniello (blind performer and choreographer) and Camilla Guarino (dramaturg) as mentors, is curated by Flavia Dalila D’Amico, and is produced by the National Centre of Dance Production Orbita Spellbound in Rome. The aim is to discover both emotional and affective ways to make contemporary dance performances accessible for blind and visually impaired audiences by engaging with AD as a means to provide layers of meaningful and multisensory access to the dramaturgy and poetics of a specific show. Every year, the curator and mentors select an artistic project through an open call, offering the possibility for a choreographer to discover suitable access strategies for his/her dance work. During the work phases, the residency includes both mixed vision mentorship and feedback sessions with blind and visually impaired spectators, using co-design as a method to test the AD and reflect the concrete desires of access-deserving people. Co-design means collaborating with people with specific lived experience to create something new, like a service, product, or research project. It’s not just about getting feedback; it’s about sharing decision-making power and working together to shape the final product, which in this case is the access dramaturgy of a contemporary dance work. So every year an artist can co-design access strategies with blind mentors and test the results with blind community members. This article combines Flavia Dalila D’Amico’s lens as scholar and residency curator with Giuseppe Comuniello and Camilla Guarino’s notes as mentors and dance artists. These three authors describe and discuss how different the solutions were tried out in the first two years of the residency.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

This essay talks about making audio description part of dance. Audio description is when someone tells Blind or visually impaired people what the dance looks like. Creazioni Accessibili (Accessible Creations) is an arts program in Rome. This essay looks at how two dances were made at Creazioni Accessibili. Flavia Dalila D’Amico organized Creazioni Accessibili. Guiseppe Comuniello is a blind performer and choreographer. Camilla Guarino is a dramaturg. A dramaturg helps the artists make art that has meaning and makes people feel. People might see, hear, smell, or feel performance. So dramaturgy is about making meaning and feeling through the senses. They all worked on these dances. The goal was to make Blind and visually impaired people feel the dance, emotionally and through descriptions of what dancers see when moving and what other people see when watching them move. The artists tried out different ways of doing audio description for dance. During the process, Blind people told the artists if the audio description worked. This means that Blind people shared their knowledge with artists so they can make something new together. In this essay, Flavia Dalila D’Amico, Guiseppe Comuniello, and Camilla Guarino write together about the different types of audio description they have tested. Some of the types of audio description they tested were

describing only the dancers’ movement, describing what the people watching did as well as the dancers, describing what the movement made them think of, and having two people describe the same movement.

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In this article, Canadian-born Blind theatre artist Alex Bulmer identifies the significant events that shaped and informed her dramaturgical practice over multiple decades. Alex reflects on (1) the access infrastructure within the UK that enabled her to develop deeper dramaturgical thinking; (2) a more profound and connected approach to dramaturgy that Alex discovered and developed as a series of “Blind Imaginings” practices; and (3) how this practice continues to de-centre visuality in performance.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

Alex Bulmer is a Blind theatre artist who was born in Canada. In this article, she talks about the events that have shaped how she makes plays. Alex thinks about:

The ways the UK supports access. This support let her think deeply about how plays mean and feel. The ways of making plays mean and feel that Alex developed. Alex calls these “Blind Imaginings.” The plays and creative projects the Blind Imaginings were developed for. How Blind Imaginings can create plays and art where seeing is not as important to meaning making as hearing, touching, and remembering.

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“Rigorous Dreaming” explores emergent curatorial practices for large-scale disability-centred performance. As these curatorial practices grow, so too does the need for intentional critique, whether aesthetic, dramaturgical, or ethical, a need that is often filled by simplistic attempts to define what “good” disability art is. This essay traces emergent curatorial practices that support the flourishing of bold large-scale disability performances on national and international stages.

These practices are made tangible through an outline of the curatorial approach that the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund is developing to engage with disability creation. Rooted in disability justice and led by a collaborative team, this approach centres disability knowledge–generating practices and offers imaginative space for disabled artists to dream about their artistic and production practices. Notably, the approach intentionally centres artistic rigour when considering new artistic creations, rather than relying on specific artistic conventions, using a definition that honours the strategies that are critical for disabled artists when developing their own conventions of rigour. Erlich and Conn argue that it is essential to differentiate between rigour and Western-colonial definitions of professional aesthetics, in order to allow disability-informed definitions of rigour to converge within the discipline.

Disabled artists in Canada and beyond deserve creative processes that support them in sharing their stories loudly and boldly in our largest performance forums. Refuting the notion that professional disability art should look a particular way, and celebrating the aesthetic diversity—including the awkward and grotesque—that naturally emerges from rigorous process, “Rigorous Dreaming” champions the curatorial groundwork that is necessary for a supported and thriving disability performance sector in Canada.

Plain Language Abstract (adapted by Kelsie Acton with Daniel Foulds)

“Rigorous Dreaming” talks about deciding which types of disability art performances get to perform in large theatres. By large theaters, we mean theatres that can fit three hundred people. We are curious about how people decide what shows to put in large theatres. We want to know how people decide if a disability performance is “good” or not. We think that it is important to decide what is “good” by looking at the performance and how the performance is made. We want people to understand what makes disability unique and why disability art might look or be shown differently than most shows in big theatres. This article explains what the people who choose performance and performers need so that they can create disability art for large theatres in Canada and around the world.

The writers, Sarah and Shay, both work at the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund. This paper talks about how they and other disabled artists are making ways to decide together whether to support a disability performance. This is important because the National Arts Centre is a large theatre that shows many art forms, not just disability art. The ways they have come up with make sure that disability justice, and disability culture, are an important part of making decisions. This includes making sure that artists feel like they have full control to make performances that come from their experiences without worrying about what is “normal” for large theatres. Because of this, we are curious about how and why an artist made the decisions that they did. We think it is important to understand how and why something was created before we make a decision. We also think that how the work looks or is performed should be judged by disabled standards. Disabled artists shouldn’t be judged by what we usually see in large theatres.

We want disabled artists in Canada and across the world to be able to make the art that is important to them. We want disabled artists to show their art in the largest theatres in the world. We think that disability art that comes from our own experience and culture is beautiful and professional and should be celebrated. We know that disability can be messy and complicated. Sometimes, our art is messy and complicated too. This is a natural part of disability art, and we want theatres around the world to understand that this is a beautiful and professional part of our work. We hope that this article helps theatres and artists have an easier time talking to each other about how wonderful disability arts can be for everyone.