"Cripples ain't supposed to be happy" sings Anita Hollander, balancing on her single leg and grinning broadly. This moment--from her multi-award-winning one-woman show, Still Standing--captures the essence of this theatre anthology. Hollander and nineteen other playwright-performers craftily subvert and smash stereotypes about how those within the disability community should look, think, and behave. Utilizing the often-conflicting tools of Critical Disability Studies and Medical Humanities, these plays and their accompanying essays approach disability as a vast, intersectional demographic, which ties individuals together less by whatever impairment, difference, or non-normative condition they experience, and more by their daily need to navigate a world that wasn't built for them. From race, gender, and sexuality to education, dating, and pandemics, these plays reveal there is no aspect of human life that does not, in some way, intersect with disability.

"Cripples ain't supposed to be happy" sings Anita Hollander, balancing on her single leg and grinning broadly. This moment--from her multi-award-winning one-woman show, Still Standing--captures the essence of this theatre anthology. Hollander and nineteen other playwright-performers craftily subvert and smash stereotypes about how those within the disability community should look, think, and behave. Utilizing the often-conflicting tools of Critical Disability Studies and Medical Humanities, these plays and their accompanying essays approach disability as a vast, intersectional demographic, which ties individuals together less by whatever impairment, difference, or non-normative condition they experience, and more by their daily need to navigate a world that wasn't built for them. From race, gender, and sexuality to education, dating, and pandemics, these plays reveal there is no aspect of human life that does not, in some way, intersect with disability.

I Was Never Alone or Oporniki presents an original ethnographic stage play, based on fieldwork conducted in Russia with adults with disabilities. The core of the work is the script of the play itself, which is accompanied by a description of the script development process, from the research in the field to rehearsals for public performances. In a supporting essay, the author argues that both ethnography and theatre can be understood as designs for being together in unusual ways, and that both practices can be deepened by recognizing the vibrant social impact of interdependency animated by vulnerability, as identified by disability theorists and activists.

This edited collection investigates the myriad ways in which disability performance travels in a globalized world. Disability arts festivals are growing in different parts of the world; theatre and dance companies with disabled artists are increasingly touring and collaborating with international partners. At the same time, theatre spaces are often not accessible, and the necessity of mobility excludes some disabled artists from being part of an international disability arts community. How does disability performance travel, who does not travel – and why? What is the role of funding and producing structures, disability arts festivals and networks around the world? How do the logics of international (co-)producing govern the way in which disability art is represented internationally? Who is excluded from being part of a touring theatre or dance company, and how can festivals, conferences, and other agents of a growing disability culture create other forms of participation, which are not limited to physical co-presence? This study will contextualize disability aesthetics, arts, media, and culture in a global frame, yet firmly rooted in its smaller national, state, and local community settings and will be of great interest to students and scholars in the field.

Bertolt Brecht's silent Kattrin in Mother Courage, or the disability performance lessons of his Peachum in The Threepenny Opera; Tennessee Williams' limping Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and hard-of-hearing Bodey in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur; Samuel Beckett's blind Hamm and his physically disabled parents Nagg and Nell in Endgame – these and many further examples attest to disability's critical place in modern drama. This Companion explores how disability performance studies and theatre practice provoke new debate about the place of disability in these works. The book traces the local and international processes and tensions at play in disability theatre, and offers a critical investigation of the challenges its aesthetics pose to mainstream and traditional practice. The book's first part surveys disability theatre's primary principles, critical terms, internal debates and key challenges to theatre practice. Examining specific disability theatre productions of modern drama, it also suggests how disability has been re-envisaged and embodied on stage. In the book's second part, leading disability studies scholars and disability theatre practitioners analyse and creatively re-imagine modern drama, demonstrating how disability aesthetics press practitioners and scholars to rethink these works in generative, valuable and timely ways.

Bringing together scholars from around the world to research the intersection between media and disability, this edited collection aims to offer an interdisciplinary exploration and critique of print, broadcast and online representations of physical and mental impairments. Drawing on a wide range of case studies addressing how people can be ‘othered’ in contemporary media, the chapters focus on analyses of hateful discourses about disability on Reddit, news coverage of disability and education, media access of individuals with disabilities, the logic of memes and brain tumour on Twitter, celebrity and Down Syndrome on Instagram, disability in TV drama, the metaphor of disability for the nation; as well as an autoethnography of treatment of breast cancer. Providing a much-needed global perspective, Disability, Media, and Representations examines the relationship between self-representation and representations in either reinforcing or debunking myths around disability, and ways in which academic discourse can be differently articulated to study the relationship between media and disability. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of disability studies and media studies as well as activists and readers engaged in debates on diversity, inclusivity and the media.

Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.

Out of Time? has many different meanings, amongst them outmoded, out of step, under time pressure, no time left, or simply delayed. In the disability context, it may also refer to resistant attitudes of living in “crip time” that contradict time as a linear process with a more or less predictable future. According to Alison Kafer, “crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” What does this mean in the disability arts? What new concepts of accessibility, crip futures, and crip resistance can be staged or created by disability performance? And how does the notion of “out of time” connect crip time with pandemic time in disability performance? The collective volume seeks to respond to these questions by exploring crip time in disability performance as both a concept and a phenomenon. The book tackles the topic from two angles: on the one hand from a theoretical point of view that connects performance analysis with crip and performance theory, on the other hand from a practice-based perspective of disability artists who develop new concepts and dramaturgies of crip time based on their own lived experiences and observations in the field of the performing and disability arts. The book gathers different types of text genres, forms, and styles that mirror the diversity of their authors. Besides theoretical and academic chapters on disability performance, the book also includes essays, poems, dramatic texts, and choreographic concepts that ref lect upon the alternative knowledge in the disability arts.

Bertolt Brecht's silent Kattrin in Mother Courage, or the disability performance lessons of his Peachum in The Threepenny Opera; Tennessee Williams' limping Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and hard-of-hearing Bodey in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur; Samuel Beckett's blind Hamm and his physically disabled parents Nagg and Nell in Endgame – these and many further examples attest to disability's critical place in modern drama. This Companion explores how disability performance studies and theatre practice provoke new debate about the place of disability in these works. The book traces the local and international processes and tensions at play in disability theatre, and offers a critical investigation of the challenges its aesthetics pose to mainstream and traditional practice. The book's first part surveys disability theatre's primary principles, critical terms, internal debates and key challenges to theatre practice. Examining specific disability theatre productions of modern drama, it also suggests how disability has been re-envisaged and embodied on stage. In the book's second part, leading disability studies scholars and disability theatre practitioners analyse and creatively re-imagine modern drama, demonstrating how disability aesthetics press practitioners and scholars to rethink these works in generative, valuable and timely ways.

Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare synthesizes Laura Mulvey’s male gaze and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s stare into a new critical lens, the filmic stare, in order to understand and analyze the visual construction of disability in adaptations of Shakespearean drama. The book explores the intersections of adaptation studies, film studies, Shakespeare studies, and disability studies to analyze twentieth and twenty-first century representations of both physical disability and ‘madness’ in global cinematic film, television film, and digital broadcast cinema in Shakespeare’s works. Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare argues that the filmic stare does not differentiate between male and female characters with disabilities, or between powerful and powerless figures in disability representation. This multi-disciplinary volume is ideal for disability studies scholars, Shakespeare scholars, and those interested in adaptations of Shakespeare’s famous works.