Bodies in Commotion:

Disability and Performance

Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, eds. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
MI, July 2005. ISBN 0-472-06891-1 (pb). 399 pp (pb). $26.95(pb); $70.00 (cl).

Chang and Eng Bunker, known to nineteenth-century pop culture mavens as “The
Siamese Twins,” were said to have enjoyed playing a particular trick on railway conductors.
Despite their fame and considerable fortune, and their carefully-tailored double overcoat,
the brothers were reputed to be frugal; when traveling by rail, they would purchase a
single ticket and calmly take their seats. When the conductor approached and asked for
tickets, Chang dutifully handed his over; Eng would be forced to admit that he had none.
The conductor would threaten to put Eng off the train, whereupon the brothers flung back
the coat, revealing their famous conjunction. Chang, feigning outrage, would threaten to
sue the railroad for breach of contract if he, a paying customer, were refused passage along
with his brother (Pingree 97). So intrigued was Mark Twain by the confusion Chang and
Eng could engender that he wrote a comic character study of conjoined twins into his novel
Puddin’head Wilson (1893), in which one twin (a teetotaler) could argue against unlawful
incarceration for his alcoholic brother’s actions while intoxicated. In both cases, the twins
in question, with bodies that defy conventional understandings of what constitutes Self
and Other, could through their careful performance expose that binary as artificial and
insufficient, and thereby subvert legislation based on such assumptions. Although the
first anecdote is likely as apocryphal as the second, it nevertheless serves as a practical
introduction to the sociopolitical performativity of disability, and an acknowledgement of
how a savvy operator (that is, a self-conscious actor) can capitalize upon the jouissance
of the socially-constructed identity to radically alter its perception, and, as a side-effect,
to create quite a commotion.
Bodies in Commotion demonstrates incontrovertibly that the core discipline of
Theatre Studies, with its central preoccupation with performativity, has a great deal to
offer the rapidly-growing field of Disability Studies, and a great deal to gain from it as
well. This long-awaited collection of essays is a testament to the increasing academic
currency of a cross-disciplinary approach to theorizing the disability identity. The basic
equation for determining the common ground between the disciplines of Theatre Studies
and Disability Studies derives from the rejection of antiquated models for recognizing and
understanding disability. It is the post-1970s “Social Model” which recognizes disability
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as a hermeneutically derived identity, rather than as an essential one, that currently unites
the disparate fields that co-identify as Disability Studies. As the hermeneutics of race,
gender, and other socially-constructed identities came under productive analysis in the
aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, so disability is currently understood not as
some ontological category but as a set of assumptions that, taken together, condition
how a given individual’s body is collectively understood within a given social matrix.
The Social Model looks at impairment of mind or body as having a relationship to
disability, but this relationship is much like the relationship between skin color and race,
or between biological sex and gender. That is to say, the one is an expedient, perversely
applied, and incomplete marker for the other; the one is illegitimately read as the other;
and the transformation of one to the other is conditioned not only by social mores and
customs but also by the actions of the individual so categorized. In the parlance of Theatre
Studies, we might quite reasonably say that disability is performative. There is a script
for disability as there is for race and gender, but, like all such roles, disability can be
played tactically, employing a wide variety of strategies ranging from the propagandistic
to the subversive to recondition its reception. The potential within this observation for
the further theorization of identity is a major factor in attracting theatre scholars in
increasing numbers to the study of disability, and is, at last, well documented in this
recent collection of essays collected by Sandahl and Auslander.
One reason why this compilation of essays has been so anxiously awaited by
the growing community of disability/performance crossover scholars is that it was hoped
such travail would be a definitive articulation of the common ground between the two
disciplines. It certainly does not disappoint in that regard, but it is by no means monolithic,
nor does it presume to be a manifesto. The essays reflect very disparate approaches and
conclusions to the problems facing the merging fields. “Because both disability and
performance are intrinsically interdisciplinary concepts,” the editors write:
the conversation between them inevitably includes other disciplinary
voices as well[…]. Each discipline has its own historical relationship
to the concepts of disability and performance, relationships that remain
palpable in these essays. The traces of earlier disciplinary formations
are important benchmarks, as they indicate the ways in which both
disability and performance throw traditional fields into commotion.
(6)
Carrie Sandahl’s work in this inter-discipline, for anyone fortunate enough to
have been exposed to it, is remarkably reflective of such “commotion”; indeed, it is
a characteristic of her inquiries into both performance and disability that they do not
seek to deny the intrinsic messiness of both sites. This is one of the pleasures of her
solo writing, and it is certainly evident in her work as an editor in collaboration with
Auslander. The wide-ranging and omnivorous curiosity of the collection, and the internal
turmoil it engenders as some of the components of the book war with others (much like
the human body itself), is one of the book’s greatest charms. As the editors note, it is a
short semantic step between the disturbance of a commotion and the harmony of co-
motion, moving together (10). That is the tightrope balance this collection achieves.
The book organizes its twenty-two essays into five broad sections, into which
the essays are rather loosely grouped rather than straitjacketed to particular preconceived
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notions from the editors. As bodies marked as disabled create commotion by blurring
conventional boundaries, so does the interdisciplinary inquiry of this collection range
from traditional forms of theatre and dance to transgressive performance art; from
culture studies and literary criticism to reports from the arts communities; and from
the mainstream stage to the realms of wheelchair sports and radical activism. The
contributors to this collection are notables from both fields. The essays do have some
common characteristics, they tend towards the theoretical, specifically towards the utility
of carefully transgressive performance to deconstruct the disability identity (and thereby
liberate persons with disabilities from the normalizing gaze that creates that identity). The
nearly two dozen entries are impossible to describe in detail here, but a few stand out in
relative importance to this growing cross-pollenation of scholarly gardens.
Of particular interest to such gardeners concerned with the thorny problems of
identity politics is the first section, titled “Taxonomies.” Here, Brenda Jo Bruggeman’s
“Delivering Disability, Willing Speech” opens with a history of rhetoric as performance
practice that commences on the shores of the ancient Aegean Sea, where disabled orator
Demosthenes rehearsed with pebbles in his mouth. In an essay that moves fluidly from
classical Athens to Christopher Reeve to the latest X-Men film, Bruggeman invokes the
established “rhetorical triangle,” the points of which are occupied by speaker, audience,
and subject. Having done so, Bruggeman then demonstrates how the performances
of someone like actor/dancer Neil Marcus, himself a notorious boundary-breaker,
significantly thwart such pat relationships, opening the door, paradoxically, for an even
more persuasive rhetoric. A second favorite in the first section of the book is Rosemarie
Garland Thomson’s “Dares to Stares; Disabled Women Performance Artists & the
Dynamics of Staring.” Thomson’s great contribution to both Disability Studies and to
theatre history was, of course, her pair of volumes from 1996 discussing the performativity
of the extraordinary body in a variety of contexts: within fiction, within the freakshow,
and within the “performance of everyday life” as articulated by Erving Goffman. Here
Thomson takes the now-familiar concept of “gaze” (which, Thomson asserts, states
“You are mine”) a step further, fully theorizing the “stare,” which is invasively and
inappropriately diagnostic (“What is wrong with you?”). Staring, in Thomson’s model, is
a dynamic social act that is longed for and carefully cultivated by the actor on stage, but
dreaded as the hostile and tedious curiosity that is the sine qua non of the disabled person
in society, an “informing experience” of the disability condition that creates “an awkward
partnership that estranges and discomforts both viewer and viewed.” Starers, as Thomson
terms them, stare to satisfy a desperate desire to make sense of a universal outlook turned
inside-out by sudden confrontation with an unusual human body:
Starers gawk with ambivalence or abandon at the prosthetic hook, the
empty sleeve, the scarred flesh, the unfocused eye, the twitching limb,
seeking a narrative that puts their disrupted world back in order. (31)
Staring at a disabled body, then, is perhaps socially permissible (whereas staring at a
normal body is rude) in favor of the comfort of the starer. Of course it is a well-rehearsed
critique of feminist theatre scholars that chauvinist “gazing” materializes female subjects;
similarly, Thomson here describes the normative “staring” that creates disability out of
some perceived impairment. Thomson has ever been annoyed with the performance that
disabled persons often find essential in order to put nondisabled persons at ease (this
is part of Goffman’s “stigma management”) but she also recognizes the transgressive
power of such performance in the hands (literally in one case) of judicious theatre artists
such as Cheryl Marie Wade, Mary Duffy, and actor/editor Carrie Sandahl.
A third essay in the first section, “Aesthetic Distance and the Fiction of
Disability” by stalwart Jim Ferris, describes how disabled performers at Southern Illinois
University at Carbondale developed a multifaceted performance piece that made canny
use of Aristotlean “disinterestedness” (perhaps more commonly known, more or less, as
Brechtian V-effekt) to challenge an audience of Thomsonian starers to re-examine their
relationships to assumed truths about the human physical condition.
But apart from providing such solid theoretical and critical background, the
volume has an added value for theatre historians as a document-record of disability-
related performances. The second section, “Disability/Deaf Aesthetics, Audiences, and
the Public Sphere,” analyzes various artists’ techniques for manipulation of audience
reception; particularly rewarding is Victoria Ann Lewis’ “Theatre Without a Hero,”
which chronicles the development of the Los Angeles P.H.*reaks project of disabled
theatre writers and actors.
The third section, “Rehabilitating the Medical Model,” looks at theatre’s
therapeutic role in the world of disability; fans of one recently passed performance pioneer
will find Philip Auslander’s “Performance as Therapy: Spalding Gray’s Autopathographic
Monologues” unexpectedly poignant (the essay was written just before Gray’s apparent
suicide in 2004). Part four of the book, “Performing Disability in Everyday Life,” builds
on the work of psychologist Erving Goffman; here, Carrie Sandahl’s essay “Tyranny of
the Neutral” mixes Joseph Roach and Leslie Fielder to provide some startling insights
into the way that stereotypes associating certain emotional and psychological truths
about certain body types can stultify actor training. Drawing comparisons to “simulation”
exercises in which students can “try on” disability identities for a while (which critics
note humiliate disabled persons as well as generate painful feelings and knee-jerk
assumptions about bodies and the individuals who inhabit them), Sandahl calls for a
“critical look at the metaphors foundational to our actor training practices” and for “new
metaphors of acting, metaphors that do not ‘dis’ the disabled” (265).
Finally, “Reading Disability in Dramatic Literature” rewards those few of us left
who still love to actually read actual dramatic texts. Sharon Snyder’s “Unfixing Disability
in Lord Byron’s The Deformed Transformed” reopens (one might even say rehabilitates)
the discussion of a playwright’s work, the significance of which is sometimes eclipsed,
ironically, by his own disability. Unraveling the tangled skein of this play’s methodical
denigrations, homoeroticism, and a powerful “devotion to the weakness and vulnerability
of the body in spite of its gross misinterpretation” (282, sic), Snyder’s delicate but
unflinching analysis breathed a new vitality into my own understanding, at least, of the
(in)famous writer.
All this material is praiseworthy, of course, but in truth the collection is not for
a general Theatre Studies audience. Advanced Disability Studies scholars will revel in
its grand compass and insights, of course. Performance Studies scholars will certainly
appreciate this book for the facility it has with interdisciplinarity, as it engages the
performance of disability from perspectives across the arts and humanities spectra, but
Bodies in Commotion may be vulnerable to the critique one often hears these days from
 Book & Performance Reviews 95
theatre scholars, that it is one more attempt to expediently raid the work of traditional
theatre scholarship in the service of an upstart discipline. My own view is that the rigorous
engagement of these collected authors should put such a criticism to rest, however.
Almost all of these collected essays can be considered accessible to an undergraduate
readership of reasonable theoretical fluency, but most undergrads will find it fairly dense
and decidedly activist (if not preachy); it is not extremely useful as an introductory text
to either Disability Studies or Performance Studies. It will be a far richer vein for Ph.D.
students to mine, and in a grad course of sufficient interdisciplinary scope this book
could act as an excellent source of complex, well-developed critical models. In the final
analysis, for theatre professionals and scholars alike, Bodies in Commotion establishes
that theatre theory can no longer afford to ignore disability performance if it still wishes
to lay claim to being in the avant-garde of social justice movements. Indeed, with the
breadth and depth of this collection, serious scholars of theatre no longer even have any
excuse to avoid this area of inquiry, the commotion it engenders notwithstanding.

Michael M. Chemers
Carnegie Mellon University

Works Cited
Pingree, Alison. “America’s United Siamese Brothers.” Monster Theory. Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen, ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996; 92-114.