Daily Spectacle
At the street performer's festival last week, where people were balancing ten plastic lawn chairs on their chins and juggling fire and throwing knives, I overheard a kid say "moooommy look at that girl in a wheelchair! I've never seen--" and I rolled by too quickly to hear the rest of it. But honestly I'm quite curious to know what she said - amdist SO much novelty and quite a few other wheelchair-users out and about at the festival that day, what could possibly have been so novel about me?
Newer readers - although I've always been disabled, I haven't always identified that way, and I'm actually quite new to the part-time wheeler identity. This has thrown another element of improvisation into the mix with this adventure, and for the most part it's been amazing - folks have been generally accommodating and respectful, and it's been a great opportunity to build skills and to be figuring this out amdist communities that don't already know me. There's something quite liberating and exciting about it - I feel like I have more room to experiment, to mess up, to play.
Naturally, I've been thinking a whole lot about the intersections of disability and performance (which is, some of you know, a common channel of thought for me). Every time I get on the bus (daily at least), I think about the ongoing performance of disability, articulated hilariously well by playwrite John Belluso: "Every time I get on a public bus, I feel like it's a moment of theater. I am 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 the theater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we as disabled people are constantly onstage and we're constantly performing."
Already thinking about the exhausting and the exhiliarating aspects of this performance, I recently ran across a MIND BLOWING essay by Carrie Sandahl about the concept of "neutral" in traditional actor training and the inherent alienation and humiliation this regularly causes for students who inhabit "non-neutral" bodies (I mean, when it comes down to it, no body is neutral - everyone's bodies carry narratives and histories that society projects onto them in different ways - but the article was specifically coming from a disability perspective, describing the lack of physical and theoretical access for disabled acting students). The mind-body conflation that typically follows the learning of "neutral" in acting classes (a facilitator will then say "now drag your legs when you walk - how does it feel to be this person?") is especially dangerous, and is something I've willingly participated in as a student, teacher, and performer. It's why - despite the fact that I'm constantly critiquing representation of disabled characters - I instinctively accentuate my scoliosis when I'm playing a villain (wtf?!). Ask someone in a theatre class to curve their spine into a shape resembling mine and they will likely scrunch up their nose and wring their hands too: a gobliny transformation.
Thinking, thinking, thinking, trying to negotiate how I will practice and learn performance skills while also understanding that some of those skills come with painful implications for my body and other bodies that deviate significantly from "neutral." Improv classes will teach you not to think - how can I not think when I've had to think out ways of making sense of my body in a world that was not made for it? I don't know. But I'm willing to not know. I'm willing to let go and see what happens. I'm willing to be gentle with myself and everyone, to be uncomfortable, to be contradictory, to be confused. I'm going to try to hold the complexity of it all without trying to resolve it right now.
I'm running out of library time and this is an endless topic (you can definitely expect more on this, for better or for worse) - so I'll end on this Walt Whitman quote:
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am very large - I contain multitudes."
