The Performing Arts & Disability Collaborative proposes to convene faculty members and graduate students monthly during the academic year, for a series of discussions, performances, and lectures centered on the topic of the performing arts and disability. These monthly activations will build up to a wider community engagement with the April symposium.
This area of inquiry brings together cultural theory, education, social justice, performance studies and disability studies (already a well-established minor program at Penn State).Our group comprises a broad and vibrant community of faculty and graduate students from English, disability studies, theatre, World Campus, Communication Sciences & Disorders, and the Center for the Performing Arts.
Based on the scholarly work of disability scholars such as Petra Kuppers, Patricia Berne,Carrie Sandhal, Patrick McKelvey and Alice Sheppard, the group will invite speakers, provide readings based on these scholars’ work, and punctuate the learning throughout with a series of performances – engaging both local and
international artists. While centering people most impacted by and with lived experience of disability, the Collaborative’s goal is to raise disability cultural consciousness beyond mere legal compliance and explore broader social and cultural questions: how do disability aesthetics reshape dominant theories of performance? What methodological shifts emerge when access is treated as form rather than accommodation? The culmination of this work will be a symposium in April, featuring public, interactive discussions of disability in tandem with a performance by a nationally recognized company working in this sphere.
We plan to engage students broadly, not only in the College of the Liberal Arts and the College of Arts and Architecture but also from the CSD and RHS minors, offering all participants a chance to enliven their learning in the company of passionate scholars in their subject areas as well as artists whose work invites the audience to reorient their understanding of the range of human variation and its expression in creative and collaborative endeavors.