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Responding to Per.Art's Dis_Sylphide: Six Voices from IFTR's Performance and Disability Working Group

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2019

MARGARET AMES ,
DAVE CALVERT ,
VIBEKE GLØRSTAD ,
KATE MAGUIRE-ROSIER ,
TONY MCCAFFREY  and
YVONNE SCHMIDT
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Abstract

This submission by IFTR's Performance and Disability working group features responses by six participants – voices projected from Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Wales, England and Australia – to Per.Art's production Dis_Sylphide, which was presented on 7 July 2018 at the Cultural Institution Vuk Karadžić as part of IFTR's conference in Belgrade at the invitation of the Performance and Disability working group. Per.Art is an independent theatre company founded in 1999 in Novi Sad, Serbia, by the internationally recognized choreographer and performer Saša Asentić, the company's artistic director. The company brings together people with learning disabilities, artists (theatre, dance and visual arts), special educators, representatives of cultural institutions, philosophers, architects and students to make work. This co-authored submission examines how the production responds to three important dance works of the twentieth century – Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (1928), Pina Bausch's Kontakthof (1978) and Xavier Le Roy's Self Unfinished (1998) – to explore normalizing and normative body concepts in dance theatre and in society, and how they have been migrating over the course of dance histories. The shared experience of witnessing the performance provoked discussion on the migration of dance forms across time and cultures, as well issues of access and (im)mobility, which are especially pertinent to a disability studies context.

Type
Theatre and Migration Dossier
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 82 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2019 

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Footnotes

The working group co-convenor Yvonne Schmidt had invited Per.Art company members to a symposium, which she organized together with the dramaturg Marcel Bugiel, in the context of the No Limits festival in Berlin in 2013 and 2015, and they also met in 2015 at the Wildwuchs festival, an integrative theatre festival in Basel, Switzerland. Dis_Sylphide is a co-production between Per.Art and Kampnagel (Hamburg), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt/M.) and MIKUB e.V., and has toured internationally.

References

Notes

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3 Ibid.

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9 Ibid.

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11 See the IFTR Performance and Disability working group mission statement, at www.iftr.org/working-groups/performance-and-disability, accessed 3 September 2018.

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24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

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36 Isin, ‘Performative Citizenship’, p. 501.

37 Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship, p. 1.

38 Ibid., p. 1.

39 Isin, ‘Performative Citizenship’, p. 504.

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44 Isin, ‘Performative Citizenship’, pp. 506–7.

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55 Saša Acentić, in the Q & A after the performance, 7 July 2018.

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59 Ibid., p. 19.

60 Esposito, ‘Community, Immunity, Biopolitics’.

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65 Ibid., p. 901.

66 Ibid., p. 899.

67 [K]onversations: Interview with Saša Asentić.

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69 Alexandre Achour, at https://vimeo.com/273123472, accessed 3 September 2018.

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