What is Disability Arts?

“The theatre is everywhere, from entertainment districts to the fringes, from the rituals of government to the ceremony of the courtroom, from the spectacle of the sporting arena to the theatres of war … Theatre and performance have been deployed as key metaphors and practices to rethink gender, economics, war, language, the fine arts, culture, and one’s sense of self.”

👩‍🎓 In her book ‘Theatre and Disability’, performer and disability activist Petra Kuppers unpacks and questions the ‘popular alignment’ (or mainstream understandings) of the disability narrative:

🎭 As experience. What does it mean to feel different in body and mind?
🎭 In public (s). What happens when one’s minority status becomes apparent?
🎭 As narrative. How are stories of disability played out on stages and in art?
🎭 As spectacle. How can we mobilise the status of disability as a powerful tool?

There isn’t any one answer to these open-ended questions. It's up to each person to find how they want to frame it. The language that signifies disability - both in every speech and artistic performance  - is a choice.

As Kuppers says: “As long as society’s aesthetics, that is, ways of thinking (and speaking) of things as beautiful, allow for difference, no disability exists.”

The Midnight Feast aesthetic allows difference so that beauty can thrive.