Differing bodyminds: Cripping choreography

Abstract

This Special Issue originated from the symposium and doctoral seminar Differing Bodyminds – Choreographing New Pathways, held in Leuven (Belgium) a few years ago. Rather than merely documenting the event, our goal is to extend the discussions and practices initiated there into a broader debate on how crip theory can reshape choreographic discourses and practices. As we argue, ‘cripping choreography’ is more than identifying disability dance or critiquing ableist structures; it involves developing a theoretical, phenomenological and performative lens for creating and analysing dance. This lens is rooted in historical and contemporary practices of non-compliant and anti-assimilationist disability-making, doing and knowing, which explicitly position disability as a desirable aspect of our world. Our collection, while building on previous thinking about disability dance and art, aims to reorient the focus from mere representation and inclusion to transformation and creation. It seeks to explore the creative potential of crip choreography poietics, celebrating often ignored and suppressed methods for crip world-making, while also explicitly attending to hopelessness, failure, ‘unlearning’ (Dind, 89 in this issue), ‘non-docile dysdance’ (Watson, 133 in this issue) and ‘wimping out’ (Melkumova-Reynolds, 17 in this issue). All authors in this issue, therefore, engage with this non-utopian perspective: What if we were to cultivate crip’s complexity, carefully tending to the cracks endemic to crip theory, practice, identity and community? How can we hold space for the complexity of crip world-making – its tensions, its failures, its competing priorities, its joys – as it manifests in dance-making processes and aesthetics?