Disability Culture and Community Performance Find a Strange and Twisted Shape [Hardcover]

Performances in hospices and on beaches; cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the US; communal poetry among mental health system survivors: this book, now in paperback, presents a senior practitioner/critic's exploration of arts-based research processes sustained over more than a decade - a subtle engagement with disability culture.List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: MAKING A HOME Landscaping: Spacings? Dancing Stories about Home: A Community Dance Residency in a Hospice in New Zealand Community Arts and Practices: Improvising Being-Together PART II: RHIZOMES/CONNECTIONS Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch Burning Butoh: Self/Community Rhizome: Choreography of a Moving Self? Rhizome: Collaboration Rhizome: Beyond Story, Community Performance and Somatic Poetics PART III: MEMORY TOUCH Introduction: Desirous History Performing Anarcha? Remembering Anarcha? The Anarcha Project Performative Lecture The Anarcha Project: A Process Report PART IV: SENSUAL HISTORY AND MYTH-MAKING Introduction Tiresian Journeys? Teaching Disability Culture: Reflections on Tiresias in the Classroom Epilogue Bibliography Index

'In this book, Petra Kuppers one of the most dynamic thinkers in the field of disability culture, disability arts and community arts today provides a rigourous, sophisticated and strikingly poetic series of mediations on the processes, pleasures and challenges of working in this field. Drawing on examples of the way her own arts based investigations have evolved across a variety of sites, contexts and countries over the past decade, Kuppers positions disability culture as a continual process of negotiation in which people experiment with new ways of relating to the languages, cultures and histories that frame and inform their experiences. Emphasising the need to access the feelings, flows and energies that exist within and between dominant formations of community, Kuppers advocates for a lS}