The gorgeously costumed disabled performers participating in the 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony seemed to defy gravity as they danced, sang and orbited around physicist Stephen Hawking's immobile slumped body. Central to the spectacle, Hawking's presence conjured the amalgamated term Petra Kuppers often employs in her new book, Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape – ‘bodymind’. The spectator could hear Hawking's virtuosic thoughts as they were processed through a biometric computer program broadcasting his voice with pristine clarity. Technology transformed his eye movements into the pronouncement. As a parade of differently abled athletes movingly entered the stadium, Hawking's exhortation that ‘there should be no boundary to human endeavour’ hailed Kuppers's contention that performances of disability culture expand our understanding of the individual and collective possibilities of embodiment.

That Paralympic broadcast, however, differs from the collaborative cultural performances of disability that Kuppers has created throughout her long career as a practitioner of disability arts. Kuppers does not often prioritize the spectator's experience. Her text and images reflect upon what can be achieved by different, singular bodyminds as a performative community. Kuppers proposes that if real social transformation indeed occurs, it happens through the somatic transfer of energy-as-knowledge between diverse movers. Working alongside collaborators (sometimes in tandem with her artist collective, Olimpias), she most values poiesis and the participants’ creative experience. Her case studies relate how professional artists and disabled local community members have engaged her projects, becoming attuned to their own and others’ economic, sexualized and racialized histories as they emerged in the exploration of embodiment, impairment and mortality.

Then why perform for an audience? Among many, two critical reasons are especially compelling. Performance undoes social practices that reduce identity to comprehensible categories of embodiment – practices that have paralysed, impaired and stigmatized queer bodies. And the mode of disability culture performance that Kuppers models is augmentative, offering spectators venues to imagine a more expansive experience of a locality's built environs, people, practices, histories and mythologies.

Kuppers argues that collective communal performance might loose one from social injuries without the imperative to overcome them. The ethics that ground disability studies seek to expand our notions of which experiences, accomplishments and bodies can be deemed worthy and exceptional. Kuppers compellingly recounts how she helped mobilize a community's reflection on these ethics in her chapter on the Anarcha project – a scholarly and performance-based tribute to three nineteenth-century slave women, Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, who were mutilated through medical research by the physician later venerated as the ‘father of gynecology’.

Kuppers's scholarly writing takes, in her own words, a ‘strange and twisted shape’ (p. 1). She swerves between critical analysis, theory, poetry, ethnography, mythology, love letters and political discourse to offer a phenomenological engagement with the sites in which she works. She invites the reader to enter into this textual choreography. Strategically avoiding testimonial or confessional revelation, Kuppers recounts her own embodied experience as she moves among differently abled interlocutors – producing a significant gift to students of performance, disability and queer culture.