CRIPPING PERFORMANCE II

One of the central commitments of the Cripping Performance series has been to introduce foundational works in disability studies and critical disability theory. Throughout the previous issue, contributors repeatedly engaged with the work of Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer, whose Feminist, Queer, Crip will be published in Slovenian translation by Maska Book Series later this year. At the same time, we must also question the epistemic authority that these texts have come to hold within critical disability theory. In this issue, Leroy F. Moore Jr. argues that the development of crip theory must also account for Black histories and experiences, which have largely been overlooked despite their significant contribution to crip terminology and political subjectivity. Moore therefore proposes the term Krip(ping), which reflects the experiences of Black disabled people; in the context of his neologism kriphop, referring to a musical genre, the term also carries the connotation of resistance characteristic of hip-hop culture.

Cripping Performance can be situated within a broader inquiry into who creates performance, for whom it is created, and to whom it is accessible—physically, socially, intellectually, and sensorily. For a long time, performance was regarded as a bourgeois aesthetic form. Over the past decades, however, a succession of “turns”—whether avant-garde, postdramatic, performative, or embodied—has fostered a growing scepticism towards one of theatre’s fundamental mechanisms: the implicit determination of which bodies, voices, and modes of presence are deemed capable of representing and embodying the dramatic canon, or of carrying humanity’s defining stories.

The second section, featuring texts by Mario Kovač, Rita Mazza, and Milesa Milinković, is therefore devoted to crip techniques—the methods and capacities through which disabled artists create performance while opening up new ways of understanding human creativity and expression. We deliberately chose not to label the individual sections explicitly, as we did not want to reduce cripping to a thematic category. At the same time, we considered it important to establish new concepts and to foreground the different trajectories of cripping as ways of understanding the diverse dimensions of disabled artistic practice.

The cripping of dance and theatre education, which forms the focus of the third section, challenges the assumption that there is only one “correct” way of moving, thinking, or learning. Like other crip approaches, it benefits not only disabled people but non-disabled people as well. In an information-saturated world, slower, more embodied, and less productivity-driven forms of learning can also support non-disabled children, for instance those who experience difficulties with attention. Theatre pedagogue Kira Shmyreva writes about creating “spaces of curiosity,” where play, dreaming, and mutual support take precedence over artistic outcomes, while director and dramaturg Jae Lee Kim reflects on the creation of Yaho Yaho, a participatory performance for neurodivergent children that understands dance not as a collection of domesticated, repetitive forms, but as a sensibility capable of moving us in an entirely different direction at any moment.

As in the previous issue, we understand cripping here as an invitation to organise time, space, attention, and relations differently. We therefore invited disabled artists, Deaf artists, and non-disabled artists from different parts of the world who lead cultural institutions, non-governmental organisations, or informal collectives, or whose artistic practices involve collaboration with diverse communities of Deaf and disabled people while cultivating distinctive forms of solidarity. In the section “Crip Solidarity”, we publish dialogic and experimentally conceived texts in which the contributors collectively reflect on what crip solidarity means to them, while also offering insight into the working methods and relationships that emerge through these practices.

Ultimately, cripping performance is not merely a question of making art accessible. It is also a question of what forms of collective life we are able to imagine. With this issue, we make one more small gesture in that direction.

Jaka Bombač

MAJA SOLAR

Understanding the Disabling and Possibilities from the Theory of Social Reproduction

LEROY F. MOORE JR.

Kripping the Term Crip: From An African-Black Perspective

MARIO KOVAČ

A View from Within

RITA MAZZA

Lost and Found in Translation

MILESA MILINKOVIĆ

Dis Giselle or Writing the Self as an Act of Resistance to Disabling: A Feminist Disability Gaze

JAE LEE KIM

More than Many: Yaho Yaho (Echoing Dance), a Dance Performance for Neurodiverse Children

KIRA SHMYREVA

Curious Spaces: Notes on Cripping with Young People

MILA ČULJAK, NATAŠA ANTULOV in ALEKSANDRA STOJAKOVIĆ OLENJUK

The Fifth Ensemble: Formally, We Don’t Exist

TONE PERNILLE ØSTERN, ARNHILD STAAL PETTERSEN, ELEN ØYEN in INGEBORG DUGSTAD SANDERS

Crip Solidarity as Labour and Support

MARIJA KOLIOPOULOU

What a Body Can Do: A Post-Bacchae Universe of Resistance

DIANA ANSELMO in DANIEL BONGIOANNI

Theatre as Access and Belonging

ERGAO (HE QIWO) in THEO WANG ZEYU

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