‘Who Cares?’ Exposing the Critical Paradox of Care in Performances of Disability and Disease Through the Lens of Disclosure

Abstract

Care needs to be taken in the process of making – and writing about – dance, theatre, and performance. Performers with disability and dementia highlight this need because the stakes are raised. Yet a ‘sticky’ paradox emerges. Disability rights activists are critical of care to the point of dangerous devaluation. ‘Who cares?’ They may say, in all earnestness. Yet, we must listen because of the history of abuse, neglect, and oppression of disabled people and people with dementia in the name of care, which continues today. Mobilising disability scholarship and disability performance theory Maguire-Rosier and Gibson critique unproblematised care theories and disability rights discourses, which are largely anti-care, pressing their argument through an investigation of acts of disclosure – both on stage and off – by artists with disability and performers living with dementia. These acts interrogate medical narratives of disability and disease, giving rise to a tension – a resistance to, and an embrace of, ‘care’. Maguire-Rosier presses her argument by examining Sydney-based Murmuration’s creative development of dance theatre work, Days Like These (2017), calling for acts of disclosure to be understood as performances of care. Gibson responds to Maguire-Rosier ‘s concerns by examining To Whom I May Concern® (2018) at Hill House Connecticut, where people with dementia, who do not necessarily see themselves as disabled, or ‘sufferers’ as they are frequently labelled in the media, enact disclosure as creative expression. The article presents the contradictions inherent to care epitomised not least in the dilemma of the authors disclosing on behalf of performance practitioners in this research.