In the early 1990s, US theatre performers and scholars Terry Galloway, Donna Marie Nudd, and Carrie Sandahl formed the Actual Lives project, a writing and performance workshop designed for disabled people that revised “traditional theatre ideals and practice from the ground up” in an effort to “uncover the richness of disabled people’s lives” (Galloway et al. Reference Galloway, Marie Nudd, Sandahl, Kuppers and Roberston2007:228). Realizing that legal accommodations for disabled people created through the US Rehabilitation Act (1973) and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) tended to overlook disabled people and their access needs, Galloway, Nudd, and Sandahl introduced the Ethic of Accommodation—a guiding document created to support their collaborative projects in accessible ways (228–29). While it is typical of theatrical organizations to do the bare minimum of architectural changes to ensure the overall accessibility of their spaces, including accessible bathrooms, box offices, and theatre houses, the Ethic of Accommodation “is a concept that implies action, a requirement to make significant change to both attitudes and architecture” (228).

Enhancing the possibility for productive relationships and exchanges among performers and audiences alike, Galloway et al. contend that the “Ethic of Accommodation is different in that we change theatrical structures, processes and performances for maximum participation of both performers and audiences” (2007:229). Their “Ethic” outlines a desire for collective participation that centers on the minority. It highlights the practice of listening (not necessarily an auditory act) among a community of people who typically feel silenced and invisible. Lastly, it makes room for identities of difference and insists that aesthetic perspectives and theatrical practices should shift in order to support difference ethically (229). With the development of disability-led performance organizations and collectives, the Ethic of Accommodation was one of the first instances of care ethics and aesthetics in disability performance that was put into practice. The Ethic of Accommodation demarcates early theoretical and practical performance interventions occurring after the Rehabilitation Act and ADA. Merging ethics with aesthetics, Galloway et al. radically cripped how they might practice, produce, and perform theatrical artworks. Their performance labor proposed that an ethics of care supports creative and artistic decision-making and their aesthetic outcomes (229).

Considering recent books on disability performance, I explore how disability arts and performance workers today contend with what Patrick McKelvey historically contextualizes as the consolidation of “vocational rehabilitation,” or the “prevailing disability policy paradigm that emphasized economic independence through competitive employment” in postwar United States (2). I also consider how care aesthetics emerge from critical disability studies perspectives on care ethics and interdependence. When examined through the give-and-take of the rehabilitation paradigm, the ethical decisions made by disability performance practitioners such as Tony McCaffrey and Petra Kuppers influence the potential for interdependent or relational processes and vice versa, contributing to forging just disability futures in performance and beyond. Furthermore, McCaffrey and Kuppers provoke critical shifts, not only in the aesthetic receptions of disability performance, but also in how disabled performers join their practices with the recuperation of disability as a creative method and epistemological advantage in a (seemingly) post-rehabilitation era.

McKelvey’s Disability Works traces the origins and remnants of rehabilitation politics in the US as it has contributed to mid- to late-20th-century disability aesthetics and performance. Picking up Alison Kafer’s critique of a “curative imaginary,” Disability Works winds back the hands of time to consider how vocational rehabilitation produced “an understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention” (Kafer Reference Kafer2013:27). Noting that the majority of existing scholarship focuses on the ADA, McKelvey is looking at an earlier period, preceding this legislation, and investigates the rehabilitation era. For example, the formation of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (1950) and the Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments (1954) are examined alongside Plays for Living (1960–1965)—a social welfare theatre organization that promoted disability culture projects as a vehicle for rehabilitating disabled individuals in order to compete in the labor market. Described by McKelvey as a “synthesis of stagecraft and statecraft” (36), Plays for Living was among the earliest vocational arts projects where disabled people might acquire the proposed “expertise that reentering the workforce requires” (36). Notably, the series of plays commissioned as part of Plays for Living sought to instill the ethos of vocational rehabilitation in disabled and non-disabled audiences alike, which emphasized a universal necessity of work and productivity and reinscribed the economic imperative of capitalism. The National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD), formed through state intervention from the US Vocational Rehabilitation Administration in 1967, is also examined for its paradoxical theatrical labor infrastructure and outputs. McKelvey queries the tensions surrounding NTD’s invention of a “universal” theatrical technique called “sign-mime” and the pressures on the company to secure hearing audiences. Set against the backdrop of the rehabilitation paradigm’s characteristics of individuality and excellence, many disabled actors found themselves excluded from the practice and dramaturgical norms imitated by NTD at the time.

Histories of disabling and debilitating Black people in the United States are intertwined with the demands of rehabilitation politics, which yokes whiteness to productivity. McKelvey analyzes the development of the Visually Impaired Project (VIP) in 1982, which eventually became the New Visions Dance Project within the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (formed in 1958 in New York City). In this section of McKelvey’s book, the registers of Black disability politics are particularly potent. “Black disability politics” is defined by Sami Schalk as “disability politics that are articulated (in text, speech, political platforms, and ideologies) or enacted (in activism, organizing, lobbying, art, and interpersonal dynamics) by Black cultural workers—an umbrella term for activists, artists, writers, scholars, intellectuals, and others whose work directly responds to and influence culture” (2022:11). Schalk foregrounds Black disability politics as intersectional but race centered; not necessarily based in disability identity; attentive to specific sociopolitical contexts and histories; and holistic, or resistant to Cartesian dualism (12–17). New Visions Dance Project engaged Black disability politics, taking account of the past while forging new pathways forward. In Alvin Ailey’s childhood, he bore witness to the racism of the Reconstruction era, where the precarity of work and performance economies for Black disabled performers was profound. This precarity is echoed in rehabilitative politics. Indeed, Ailey’s own disability experience looms large (albeit relatively nonapparent), as according to McKelvey his disability is “well documented, but critics and scholars have not yet contextualized the choreographer in larger histories of disability politics” (215). New Visions Dance Project flourished as a dance education framework for blind students, and Ailey’s support enabled a broader interweaving of “histories of Black labor, disability, performance, and resistance” (213).

Through an examination of queer disability history, Disability Works expands upon Robert McRuer’s theory of “compulsory able-bodiedness” (2006:2) to include disability performance during the rehabilitation era. According to McRuer, compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality are interconnected and are imagined through (and against) neoliberal capitalism and the insecurity of employment or work for queer and disabled people (2006:1–10). McKelvey picks up McRuer’s concepts of ability and sexuality to examine how queercrip performance work emerged through the constraints of the rehabilitation era and resisted the dominant economic and cultural systems that emphasize normativity, independence, and productivity. Disabled performance practitioners of the rehabilitation era often contended with anti-identity and disability essentialism. As a strategy for unsettling the rehabilitative paradigm, these practitioners created “crip performance practices and infrastructures that redirected political energies” (6). Following Carrie Sandahl (Reference Sandahl2003), Robert McRuer (Reference McRuer2006), and Alison Kafer (Reference Kafer2013), the term “crip” emerged in the early 2000s as divergence from aspirations of able-bodiedness, able-mindedness, and ideologies of the “normal.” McKelvey, however, articulates the early presence of radical and strategic cripping carried out by disabled artists amid rehabilitative and vocational-era politics. For example, a robust examination of disabled playwright Ron Whyte’s queercrip and epistolary performance work in the late 1970s is explored by McKelvey as anticipatory of Kuppers’s yet-to-come arts research with “domestic sites of disability activism, performance, and culture making” (140). Although creating disability performance at different times, both Whyte’s and Kuppers’s works can be characterized as undermining the violence of state-controlled labor and performance present in the rehabilitation paradigm. While McKelvey focuses on the period before ADA, much of Disability Works alludes to how 21st century and contemporary disability performances carry and negotiate an ongoing entanglement with “rehabilitation exceptionalism” (72).

In Giving and Taking Voice, Tony McCaffrey examines 18 years of sustained theatre practice and research as it has existed alongside and with “the presence and voice of learning disabled artists” (3) in Different Light Theatre (Christchurch, New Zealand). McCaffrey critically recounts the challenges faced when attempting to balance care and support with artistic rigor in learning disabled theatre. In alignment with artists and scholars who understand disability as a social and political category, an identity, and experience, McCaffrey chooses the terminology of “learning disabled people,” also known as identity-first language, which effectively foregrounds disability experience as integral to disabled people’s lifeworlds, rather than as ancillary. McCaffrey elects the terms “learning disability” and “learning disabled” instead of terms like “intellectual disability” or “cognitive disability” in order to “suggest that the disabling is systemic” and that there might be a “deficiency in systems of learning and teaching” (30). Throughout the book, McCaffrey shares archives of interviews with performers, methods and approaches for devising learning disabled theatre and its performance outcomes, as well as travel and performance logs that detail the innerworkings of disabled theatre work over time and terrain.

McCaffrey reflects upon the scope of Different Light’s collaborative work to include early performances such as A Different Light (2004), The Birds (2006), and Ships of Fools (2007), which practiced “a ‘mixed ability’ model including both disabled and non-disabled performers onstage” (33). The author examines how these initial iterations of performance research revealed troublesome gaps, which left learning disabled performers behind and demonstrated the extent of inherent ableism in theatre training and making. For example, top-down theatrical practices revealed imbalances in power relations and tones of infantilization, which constrain the possibilities of learning disabled theatre. Different Light’s shift to working with only disabled performers onstage while non-disabled facilitators remain offstage is an attempt to honor artists’ autonomy and agency alongside thematic or narrative theatrical frameworks while negotiating the various inequities this work discovered. Describing disability-centered practice and performance, the author acknowledges how attempts to explore care ethics and interdependence remain in “tension with the hierarchical processes and disciplinary formations of dramatic theatre still being imposed by non-disabled facilitators” (34). Giving and Taking Voice further examines how the politics and aesthetics of the company were impacted by the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010–11, the “Human Pause of the pandemic” (36), and more recent explorations of performance that emphasize research rather than paid public work. McCaffrey attends to “affect, empathy, sympathy, support, and care” (2) as productive components of learning disabled theatre.

McCaffrey’s emphasis on the give-and-take of “voice” is interesting when considered alongside what McKelvey proposes as the collision of disability performance and disability policy. Indeed, questions of “giving” and “taking” may be compared to the ways in which vocational rehabilitation programs have historically operated under the guise of giving to disabled people, while at the same time, taking from them. Vocational rehabilitation programs offer work to disabled people while constraining them through persistent legal formations of what constitutes as work and disability. McCaffrey recounts the moment in Different Light’s lineage when the company decided to “turn from post-therapeutic performance to dramatic theatre” wherein “the aspiration to professional performance and remuneration of the learning disabled performers” (84) might be explored. Resisting the pervasiveness of what McKelvey describes as “rehabilitation’s stubborn remaining” (29), McCaffrey recognizes that the actors of Different Light offer even more possibilities than those imagined through conventional configurations of performance. In short, McCaffrey proposes that through a reflexive model, learning disabled actors may offer performance “on their own terms” (85). Such terms surpass the parameters of conventional artistic labor and recognizable theatrical methodologies. Different Light proposes theatrical methodologies that honor the fluid and contingent experiences of disability and do not conform to the “economically-based momentum of theatrical production as product or output” (6).

Considering the historical underpinnings of US vocational rehabilitation alongside Different Light is also an opportunity to compare 20th-century disability arts labor with contemporary disability performance and notice the absence or presence of collaboration and accountability. Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s paradoxical concepts of hospitality and hostility (2002:365), McCaffrey notes the presence of both inclusion and exclusion in learning disabled theatre, which may be traced back to tensions produced in the rehabilitation era. Offering reasons why access and inclusion are challenging to achieve, McCaffrey writes that disabled people “are particularly prone to being treated with a reception by the non-disabled that swings between the appearance of hospitality and an irrepressible hostility perhaps because such people represent the community of the normative the once and future revenants of an unsustainable normative wholeness” (53). In comparison, Disability Works articulates how the promise of welfare and support in rehabilitation policy simultaneously uplifted and controlled disabled artists’ pathways for performance and representation since performance opportunities determined artists’ eligibility for benefits. Unfortunately, the incongruity or imbalance in power relations between disabled and non-disabled people is a familiar trope in contemporary critical disability studies. It has produced the dominant ableist narrative that disabled people must remain “patients,” “waiting,” “broken,” and “grateful” (Piepzna-Samarasinha Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2018:145). Crip performance today redresses the curative and rehabilitative authority, which, though it continues to lurk, must be further unpicked in order to support disabled people who may require support albeit through preferred routes of self-sovereignty and collective care.

Petra Kuppers’s term “eco soma” is proposed, or—more accurately—sensed, as a disability method that attends to somatic experiences with performance works. Kuppers intentionally leaves a gap between the words “eco” and “soma” in order to draw attention to both the space of distance and the potential for travel between the bodymind and its ecological partners. Through a phenomenological perspective, Kuppers explores the productive instability of “water and air mixing, land and history mixing, bodies on land, in air, on and under the water” (14). Examining the co-relational braiding of objects, animals, elements, and outer space in disability performance practices, Kuppers asks how bodies, organisms, and environments exist in relationship and resiliency. Eco Soma also “engages with the longings of fantasy and make believe” (15) and opens up experiences of speculative performance for the participant-observer-creator. Speculative performance is often resourced by disability performance artists (e.g., Pelenakeke Brown, Yo-Yo Lin, iele paloumpis, Michael Turinsky, and Raquel Meseguer Zafe, among others) as a crip tool to unsettle traditional and normative able-bodyminded performance experiences and to offer opportunities for artists and audiences alike to imagine otherwise. Through performance practices associated with the imaginary, Eco Soma explores what new “nonmonoculture perspectives” (14) might be potentialized at the site of what Kuppers refers to as an “eco soma encounter zone” (5). Identifying as a white disabled woman, Kuppers’s personal lineage for Eco Soma “emerges from disability culture, queer phenomenology, ecopoetics, experimental anthropology, psychogeography, affect theory, and from long immersion in somatic movement modalities and performance practices” (2). Kuppers’s situated knowledge as a disabled person, too often “deemed debilitated in neoliberal worlds” (70), allows her to be attuned to ethical concerns when engaging in cross-cultural collaborations with marginalized populations.

The book journeys through sensations and experiences as they occur in collections of disability performance actions such as Rollercoaster Theatre’s performance of GAWK in Melbourne, Australia, in 2006; and Salamander, a project that began with disabled artist Neil Marcus and Kuppers in San Francisco in 2013, among others. GAWK performers are graduates of a vocational theatre training course for people with a range of disabilities and learning needs. The performance, which occurred on a tall platform in a public square, engages with the politics of being stared at and staring. Performers of GAWK extend Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theorization of staring as “an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim” (2009:9). Instead, GAWK inverts the typical direction of staring, casting it from disabled performers toward the audience, all while the performers wear varying and diverse costume armor such as “fat suits, beehives, organic or plant matter, bishop’s miters, huge hair, and even cheese wedges” (33).

Kuppers explores her personal experience of GAWK as felt in layers wherein the author is alert to the “production of disability culture labor” as it exists in the context of an “educational framework” (31). In GAWK, Kuppers recognizes what McKelvey describes as artists who are “both enabled and restrained” (29) by rehabilitation-era rhetoric and laws. For example, as an audience of this performance, Kuppers describes the ways in which she simultaneously senses the valences of disabled creative life made possible by vocational and rehabilitation acts and disabled people’s desire for interdependence over independence. Through their recounting of GAWK, the author alludes to a double articulation: disabled people’s desire for access to arts labor while simultaneously yearning to withdraw from traditional work and economic power structures or to offer anti-capitalist critiques of what constitutes work. GAWK ignites the kind of complexity of tensions familiar to disabled people and our cripistemological perspectives.

Kuppers’s Salamander explores “swimming together as an art project” (123) and has expanded to a series of multi-site workshops and public gatherings for disabled artists. It has dived into pools, rivers, thermal baths, and oceans where the water and salamander—as mythical metaphors of transformation—are sites through which disabled artists float together. Kuppers reflects that, while submerged, groups often discuss how their disabled “ecosystems are under duress” (125). From climate justice to Disability Justice,Footnote ¹ participants share and discuss personal experiences, in particular, feelings of being devalued when unable to participate in traditional “mechanisms of work” (125). Participants consider themselves within a “human ecology and its organizational structures and values” (125), which predominately focus on labor. Swimming away from normative values that intertwine work and productivity, community practices with Salamander affirm the value of disabled people through an attention to relationality. Kuppers articulates that even though “more and more people experience the snipping away of the welfare safety net” (125), collective practices of disabled gathering, storytelling, and swimming may generate new interdependent nets of disabled care.

Salamander resonates generatively with McKelvey’s analysis of disabled productivity, the prioritization of the individual, and how the tethering of labor and welfare reveal “work” as a hope and a problem for disabled people. Describing the austerity budgets in 1970s New York, McKelvey historically traces the ways in which “Work increasingly presented the only path forward even when, for so many, there was no option to work” (107). Salamander makes space in the water for these issues to be reflected upon and for participants to splash around in a disabled ecology. With flippers and goggles, participants swim to create webs of disabled interdependence and care, making “the everyday diversity of the pool into a political field” (128). Much of the work of Salamander processes disabled people’s everyday performances of dependence and independence and examines how interdependence explodes our assumptions about labor in a capitalist system.

Care ethics, interdependence, and care aesthetics are present in McCaffrey’s and Kuppers’s scholarship and performance work: their work results from and speaks back to the compulsory able-bodyminded instruments of the rehabilitation era. Disability practices and theories surrounding the term “care” abound and primarily emerge from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s proposal of “care webs,” which refers to the ways in which disabled communities come together to

The tensions in Piepzna-Samarasinha’s conception of care webs join with McCaffrey’s understanding of “giving” and “taking,” Kuppers’s descriptions of “pain” and “joy,” and McKelvey’s contextualization of the state afforded, yet restrained, access to professional mobility. Notably, each of these oppositional poles also signals the processual movement between—the crip ways of being in the world that are non-static and emergent.

This oscillation is an apt metaphor for how care aesthetics may emerge through community performance. For example, in Giving and Taking Voice, McCaffrey attends to positionality as a non-disabled person and offers accountability for the ways in which it has been necessary to learn to attune to the contributions of learning disabled artists. For instance, rather than ascribing to the authority of the individual voice, McCaffrey’s relationship with the voices of learning disabled artists has developed toward a “polyvocal approach” (7). In this context, polyvocality is understood as both the practice of incorporating multiple perspectives in a narrative and the acceptance of non-normative speech sometimes present for learning disabled people. McCaffrey’s concern for reconfiguring relationships to speech in theatre, or as the author writes, “listening different voices to speech” (4), lends itself to the thinking and practices of relationality imbricated in care ethics. Embracing opportunities for more than one voice in performance may be compared with a care ethics perspective of relationality or “the relationality of human existence over autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency” (Saito Reference Saito2022:47–48).

Turtle Disco is a monthly local community art gathering co-created by Kuppers and wife/creative partner Stephanie Heit in 2017 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. As a mutable kaffeeklatsch that takes place either in person or online, Turtle Disco invites disability and queer culture sharing, which may include contemplative writing, dancing, poems, and videos. The practices that convene through Turtle Disco consider “small cooperatives, small communities, healing and recharging caves” (155) rather than the large-scale spectacle of performance production associated with a theatrical venue, which, through architectural and aesthetic inaccessibility, remains out of reach for many disabled people. Turtle Disco “listens actively for the ethical demands” (68) through its small and intentional practices that weave a collective of disabled queer people together. During sessions, practices often entangle—writings become dances, comforting blankets arise as puppets, and small figurines are imagined as crip extensions of the bodymind. These interconnected rehearsals of disabled queer relationalities explore the ethics and aesthetics of care—“a mode of being in the world through interacting with others” (Saito Reference Saito2022:14).

Stretching across differences is familiar within the degrees of disability community practices, as too often disabled people must reconcile the collision of varying access needs within the space of cross-disability work (i.e., disability arts practices that involve people with different disability experiences and identities). While McKelvey reveals an archive of rehabilitation era disability performances that anticipated (and in some cases fueled) relationalities of difference, McCaffrey and Kuppers articulate 21st-century disability performances of care ethics and the aesthetic implications that follow. These moments are generative lessons in systems of care and repair, offering readers insights into how just futures are made possible through co-creating disability community performance. Herein lies the tremendous, twofold significance of these authors’ research: disability performance that takes on care ethics ruptures ableisms and hegemonies of conventional theatre and, simultaneously, care aesthetics emerge.