What are you looking at?: Staring down notions of the disabled body in dance

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the display of the disabled body in dance performance. I use Heidi Latsky’s Five Open Mouths as an example of how staging physical otherness can be an act of provocation that reframes conventional perceptions of the disabled dancing body. I draw on cultural critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s construct of the ‘baroque stare’ as a prolonged and engaged visual encounter between seer and seen. Used productively in dance, this stare helps viewers recognize how they experience seeing and holds potential as a generative site for renegotiating social, cultural and aesthetic assumptions about the disabled body.