Over the past decade and a half, performance and disability studies have established themselves as leading interdisciplinary voices in the arts, humanities and social sciences. That these fields would eventually enter into dialogue comes as no surprise, given the investment of performance studies in the body as a social and cultural agent and the focus of disability studies on corporeal performance and spectacle. What makes this volume such an important contribution to both fields is how rich this dialogue turns out to be. Drawing together scholars and arts practitioners from a range of disciplines and institutional sites, the twenty-four essays collected here provide an exciting range of methodologies for thinking about normativity, visuality, bodily identity and the negotiations inherent in performance.

The subjects they explore are diverse, including ‘disability as a performance of everyday life, as a metaphor in dramatic literature, and as the work of disabled performance artists’ (p. 1). Many of the authors included in this volume address the social scripts through which the experiences of disabled people have traditionally been read – the ‘inspirational overcomer’, for example, the ‘freak’, or the ‘Tiny Tim’ – and the codes of visibility and invisibility with which the disabled must continually contend. In an essay that offers much to our understanding of spectatorship, Rosemarie Garland Thomson considers the act of staring as a social manifestation – prohibited yet surreptitiously indulged – of ambivalence towards the disabled body. Other authors explore the representational practices and innovations with which disabled performers have challenged conventional notions of theatre. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, for example, explores the representational interaction between the live body and its technologically mediated image on stage in the work of Cathy Weis, a dancer–choreographer with multiple sclerosis.

Still other authors apply a disability perspective to the practices and relationships of traditional theatre. In one of the volume's most thought-provoking essays, Carrie Stendahl considers the exclusionary force of such concepts as the ‘neutral’ and ‘natural’ body within contemporary acting training. Whether the subject is the politics of deaf performance in the Amaryllis Theater Company's 2000 performance of Twelfth Night, the use of Boalian ‘invisible theatre’ within the disability-studies classroom, or a reading of Byron's unfinished play The Deformed Transformed, this collection offers engaging investigations into the relationship between performativity and the extraordinary body, allowing us to understand and connect the fields of theatre, performance and disability studies in new, mutually illuminating ways.