Scores

Abstract

A prominent voice in the New Disability Arts movement, Carolyn Lazard is a multidisciplinary artist rethinking captioning and other access techniques as tools for composition. Reading several of Lazard’s works and collaborations, this essay theorizes the style of captions that functions as “scores”—open-ended scripts inviting audience members to activate the work, their bodies, and each other. As performance scores, these captions instruct or otherwise engage with readers/audiences, requesting their participation in the artmaking process. Lazard’s use of “scores” in works such as A Recipe for Disaster (2018), CRIP TIME (2018), and Notes from a Panorama (2021) carefully centers Black and brown, chronically ill, and other marginalized communities. As such, it uncovers the repetitive care labor of spectatorship as a form of survival.