Introduction: Performance and Disability

Abstract

On April 30, 2016, Cripping the Stage: A Disability Arts Cabaret presented “cutting-edge disabled artists from Canada and the United Kingdom.” The event, co-hosted by Alex Bulmer and Mat Fraser, aimed to put “disabled performers centre stage to celebrate Cripping the Arts Symposium presented by Tangled Art + Disability, a three-day event seeking to advance Deaf and Disability Arts in Canada, and enliven the vibrancy of Canadian culture” (“Cripping”). As demonstrated in the present issue, this exciting international event was one of many important disability theatre initiatives offered during the 2015 and 2016 seasons, a period that also saw disability theatre artists working with the National Arts Centre, Stratford Festival, Banff Fine Arts Centre, Playwrights Theatre Centre, Playwright’s Workshop Montreal, and Luminato Festival. This issue, then, appears in a remarkably generative period of disability theatre activity in Canada. In the past five years, national institutions and granting councils have sought to respond to, catch up with, and foster new conversations among disability theatre and performance practitioners. In 2012, for example, the Canada Council for the Arts released an access and equality strategy targeting Deaf and disability arts. While on one level this signaled a desire to “expand the arts” according to the council’s equity strategy, it also built from a recognition “that Deaf and disability arts are important evolving sectors and art practices in the Canadian arts ecology, to be supported, promoted and advanced” (Canada Council, “Executive”).