Crip* Ecologies of Producing Dance
What kinds of ecologies of producing dance exist, and are emerging, when disability and crip are the focus?
How do crip ecologies influence practice and approaches to making and producing dance?
Crip* Ecologies of Producing Dance is a partnership between The Work Room (Anita Clark) and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (Dr Sarah Hopfinger), as part of the Future Ecologies: Producing Dance Network supported through the AHRC Dance Research Matters programme. This is bringing together higher education institutions and dance organisations across the UK to scope the ecosystem that supports those involved in producing dance
In September 2024 over forty disabled and non-disabled artists, producers, and researchers, whose work and interests relate to disability dance, came together to explore and share insights about crip ecologies of producing dance. This hybrid event included artist contributions from Dr Aby Watson, Laura Fisher, Salma Faraji and Claire Cunningham, which took the form of performance lectures and performance sharings. The event included creative prompts for conversation, roundtable discussions, informal conversation, spaces to rest and a quiet room. The aim was to embody care and inclusion through the form and structure of the day.
*Context and Crip
‘Crip’ is an identity, a politic, an activism, which some disabled individuals choose to identify with. It relates to the affirmative model of disability, which disabled scholars Nancy Hansen and Chris Philo discuss as ‘the normality of (different bodies) doing things differently’ (2007, 493). Drawing on the ethos of the disability arts movement and disability pride, crip is reclaimed from the derisive term ‘cripple’; a similar process of reclaiming language as queer activist and academic movements. Crip is a politicised view that challenges pity and deficit narratives of disability, refusing the configurations of disability as tragedy, dejection and loss. The affirmative model argues that an individual’s impairment is a crucial aspect of their identity and their place within disability or ‘crip’ culture. With crip, disability can be understood to offer rich creativity and knowledge. For disabled scholar Alison Kafer, crip refers to a ‘cripped politics of access and engagementʼ where to ‘say that something is “political” . . . means that it is implicated in relations of power and that those relations, their assumptions, and their effects are contested and contestable, open to dissent and debateʼ (2013, 3;9).
The following quote about ‘crip’ is from some collaborative research into dancing with chronic pain carried out by Dr Sarah Hopfinger and dance artist Raquel Mesequer Zafe,
I think about crip . . . [as] an idea, tool, a provocation . . . It feels different to . . . adapting myself to something, it feels bold, cheeky, playful, transgressive . . . If I am adapting, it’s like I’m still accepting that thing totally and I am asking to be different within it, whereas crip feels like it would say “well I’m not taking any of that, or I’m going to take it and take it this way because that is what is good and interesting for me” . . . [Crip has] energy and more possibilities [than adaptation or inclusion]. . . [Crip] doesn’t ask, it shakes up . . . takes space . . . I couldn’t give someone an instruction of what crip is because it is individual for all of us . . . It is widening the playing field . . . a different lens, a different paradigm, where things are assigned different value, where things I didn’t value before now have value or have the potential to have value.
Raquel Mesequer Zafe, 2022.
If ecology is about relations and systems, with crip ecology we are interested in what kinds of relations and systems support - and do not support - producing crip and disability dance. What might crip dance practices, artistic forms, rehearsal structures, ways of touring, performer-audience relations etc, be?
What follows is a collection of questions, artist quotes, performance reflections, and images, gathered from the Crip Ecologies event – an ecology of ideas about crip ways of producing dance!
Prompts for roundtable discussions
What crip or disabled-led practices (of producing, of dance-making) do you have experience of, or know of?
What feels significant or important to you about crip?
How do crip ecologies influence practices of making dance?
How do crip ecologies influence approaches to producing dance?
What is difficult, what is easeful, for you in creating / producing dance?
What ways of working would make you want to repeatedly perform a work?
What producing practices would make you want to keep making dance happen?
What would be pleasurable?
How might future ecologies of crip producing in dance look, sound, taste, feel like?
Disordering Dance: Dr Aby Watson
In this performance lecture, Aby explores neurodiversity as natural and creative, creating dance as ‘sensory process(ing), not as commodified product’. For Aby, ‘stimming is dancing and dancing in stimming’. She creates ‘radically relaxed performance’, which is when the show’s ‘relaxed nature is foundational to the work and creatively utilises the relaxed environment’.
Image: Aby Watson / Disordering Dance
I Hear You: Salma Faraji
‘Am I too Old, too different, too vulnerable, too honest?
Salma asks the audience, in spoken English and in British Sign Language. We share in this performance – developed from the text from personal journals– charting her experiences of being visible different and standing out.
Leaning into signing, when unable to speak out – Salma brings to the performance a movement language which explores non-verbal communication, similarities within diverse context and seeks to challenge silence through portals of connection, empathy and shared vulnerability.
The performance– from Salma and accompanied by celloist Peter Nicolson – is full of spaciousness. It invites us, the audience, to imagine another’s experience and encourages us to practice empathy.
Image: Salma Faraji peforming 'I Hear You'
Strategies for Slowing Down: Laura Fisher
‘Slowing down is about unlearning urgency as the default’
‘What’s possible for all of us will be different’
‘The artistic possibilities of doing things differently’
‘Create change within the spheres of your influence’
‘Make plans generously, hold them lightly’
‘Whatever is possible today is enough’
‘People should always come before the project’
‘Make rest precious’
‘A score for a sore and tired body’
‘Adaptable, scalable work’
‘Dramaturgies of rest and slowness’
‘Resist extractive ways of thinking’
‘Stop trying to always start from scratch’
‘What am I prepared to let go of?’
‘Where can I build on and support the work of others?’
‘What are my tools of soft resistance?’
Image: Laura Fisher with BSL interpration from Amy Cheskin
The Choreography of Care: Claire Cunningham
‘The aesthetics of access – the practice of embedding access tools and strategies into performance making and staging’
‘Noticing what is difficult or easeful for disabled folks, and acting on it, as a form of care’
‘Design as Care…opening out to consider design of a project, design of a schedule, someone’s journey to rehearsal’
‘How might making it easy to leave be an act of care?’
‘Someone leaving could be a positive act’
‘Time as Care…giving time is important and may save time later’
‘Check-in time… giving attention and time…is not additional but is part of the work’
‘Communication as Care… recognise various ways and speeds of communicating’
‘Performance as Care… performing itself as an act of care’
‘What do I desire next, what would feed me, what would make want to repeatedly perform a work?’
‘Audience aftercare as part of the show, not additional’
‘The Complexity of Care…what happens when the needs and desires of some affect the needs and desires of others?’
‘Care takes many forms’
Image: Presentation by Claire Cunningham
All photos by Emily Nicholl