Disabled Theater

Co-presented with Performa as part of Performa 13.

 

Choreographer Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater is a collaboration between Bel and 11 actors from Zurich’s Theater Hora, Switzerland’s best-known professional theater company comprised of actors with learning and mental disabilities. With Disabled Theater, Bel opens up a space where disability is not expelled from visual and discursive practices, nor hidden behind the screen of political correctness. Instead, he places it squarely at the center of a discourse that has a bearing on both the aesthetic and political dimensions.

Sparking both debate and praise across Europe, the work was a sensation at Documenta 13. Roberta Smith of the New York Times dubbed it “transcendent art,” adding that she “started shocked and disoriented and ended up completely caught up in it and grateful for what it revealed to me about what is often called ‘our common humanity.”

Nov 14 at 6:30pm Come Early Conversation: Otherly Abled Bodies in Performance, Bill Shannon (Visual Artist and Choreographer) in conversation with Sunaura Taylor (Painter and Activist for Disability and Animal Rights).

Nov 16 Stay Late Discussion: Theater, Discomfort, and the Making of  Disabled Theater, Carla Peterson, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts in dialogue with Jérôme Bel.