Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers [Hardcover]

In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.Introduction - Disability, Performance and the Public Sphere 1. Weebles, Mirages and Living Mirrors: The Ethics of Embarrassed Laughter 2. Drug Deals, Samaritans and Suicides: Bodies on the Brink of the Visible 3. 'That You Would Post Such a Thing...': Staging Spectatorship Online 4. Same Difference?: Disability, Presence, Performance and Ethics Conclusion - (Dia)logics of Difference

Bree Hadley's study of disability performance and spectatorship marks a maturing of the field, a moment which takes stock of the interventions disabled performance artists make in public - and, more specifically, how they can help us redefine and rethink notions of the 'public sphere'. Through grounded and exciting case studies of installation, live art, public space interventions and online public arenas, Hadley shows the challenges disabled artists offer to a mainstream that still wishes to keep disability contained. This book will offer indispensable insights to social practice artists who create encounters as the basis of their art practice, to their critics and their involved observers. - Petra Kuppers, University of Michigan, USA

Bree Hadley is Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Her research investigates the construction of identity in contemporary, pop cultural and public space performance practices, concentrating particularly on the way spectators are positioned as co-performers in these practices.