Abstract
In a world increasingly shaped by polarization—political, cultural, and economic—disability performance art practices offer critical vantage points for rethinking relations beyond imposed binaries. While authoritarian regimes and corporate actors often thrive on oppositional logics, disability performing arts foreground collaboration, embodiment, and shared vulnerability. This paper invites anthropological explorations of disability performance art—ranging from dance and theatre to political performances—as practices that both reveal and resist polarized conditions. I am particularly interested in contexts of conflict and crisis, where temporalities and spaces of creation are disrupted: wartime and post-war rhythms, fragile cultural infrastructures, and artistic spaces marked simultaneously by exclusion and aspiration. My paper considers: How do disability performance art practices challenge polarizing logics while cultivating entangled modes of being and imagining? How do artists of disability culture negotiate pressures of political alignment while generating spaces of experimentation, solidarity, and hope? What methodological tools—collaborative, embodied, performative—can ethnographers develop to attend to performance in contested times and places? By bringing together perspectives from disability performance, dance anthropology, and ethnographic theatre across diverse regions—including the Global East and beyond—this paper examines performance as both a site of contestation and an experimental ground.
Presenters
Gili HammerSenior Lecturer, Sociology & Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Disability; Performance; Global East; Community; Dance; Theatre
