The Spectacle of Difference: Dance and Disability on Screen

Abstract

T he way in which disabled dancers appear in performance and are represented through performance has been the subject of discussion for a number of writers in recent years.1 These writings have drawn attention to how disabled performers challenge dominant views of disability as variously standing for less than, as other, as diminished, and as equated with loss. These writings, though relatively few in number, have been important for those working within the professional dance community. They have also stimulated further thought about how audiences view and form judgments about disability in performance and how disability presents useful challenges to the prevailing dance aesthetic. But, much of the existing writing is confined to addressing and critiquing the live performance event, whereas the focus for this essay is dance and disability on screen, which might raise different questions about how the viewer encounters and experiences disability, about the communion between viewer and screen and which also gives rise to a spectacular event: the spectacle of difference.I am aware that looking at disabled dancers on film might usefully draw on different registers for sense-and meaning-making. As Sandahl and Auslander point out, disability is something one does rather than something one is (10).2 For people with disabilities, their experience of being 'out of the ordinary' and 'out of place' means that disability is already a kind of performance for them. By looking towards a broader theoretical framework, I want to explore what impact the framing of the screen has on the identities of those who dance with disabilities, how disabled dancers perform their own identities, and how this is read and interpreted by the viewer. So, my focus is on the screening of disabled dancers within dance films and how readings of disability on screen might generate a theory of looking; might disrupt a presumption of the relationship between screendance and mobility; and therefore make clear the political implications of screendance. In each of the screendance examples I refer to, the body itself is therefore fundamental to my reading and response.Disability theorists Mitchell and Snyder discuss how the relationship between screen and viewer calls on particular notions of spectatorship.3 They interrogate the nexus between spectator and the filmed disabled body as a spectacle by delving into "the psychic structures that give meaning to disability as a constructed social space" (157). I acknowledge that I am not a neutral spectator. By writing from my own embodied, subjective position I accept that I am not writing as a viewer with a disability, 4 and whilst I do not wish to ignore the viewpoint of audience members with disabilities, it is not the main purpose of this essay to explore what might be seen as a disabled gaze in relation to film. Nonetheless, I wish to distance this study from those projects that might treat disabled bodies as research objects of investigations: a position where "bodies marked as anomalous are offered for co...

Differences in Itself: Redefining Disability through Dance

“…All the characters in the film have their own individuality, their own way of being, and their own autonomy, which make them all slightly different to what is perceived to be the 'normal' or 'the average'. According to Whatley (2010), the film is so powerful because "it is located in bodies and bodily sensation that might be characterized as excessive" (p. 45). The film also blurs the boundary between fiction and reality (another example of binary thinking).…”

“…Since the stretching dancers in the studio are not looking, we as spectators are invited to look. However, the way we look at this scene is changed by the (ignoring) attitude of the silent witnesses: apparently the scene is not that important, perhaps it is too ordinary (Whatley, 2010). As a result, the spectator's dominant gaze is interrupted and instead the spectator is invited to use different ways of looking (namely seeing, feeling and sensing).…”

Tales from the crypt: A psychoanalytic approach to disability representation in advertising

“…Although there have been recent attempts to represent people with disabilities in more empowering ways, for example, as paralympic athletes (Kearney et al, 2019) or spectacular dancers (Whatley, 2018), many bodily forms remain invisible in mainstream media (Foster and Pettinicchio, 2021). Instead, consumer culture tends to glorify the “supercrip”—a disabled individual whose recognition in society largely depends on the extent to which they are perceived by the public as having defeated their disabilities, thus meeting able-bodied standards (Kafer, 2013).…”

Performing Illness: A Dialogue About an Invisibly Disabled Dancing Body

“…For an overview of the relationship between sense of agency and consciousness across interdisciplinary approaches seeObhi et al (2015).3 For further elucidations on the difference between "sense of other" and "sense of us" and collective agency seeMartens (2018).4 For insights into screendance and disability on screen seeWhatley (2010).Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org…”