Invigorating Disability Aesthetics through Art and Performance: A Report from the Bodies of Work Festival of Disability Arts and Culture 2013

In disability studies, the visual and performing arts simultaneously mirror and reshape increasingly complex critical questions about disability aesthetics. Can caregivers make disability art? Is casting non-disabled actors in disabled theatrical roles ever an appropriate choice? How do we access more complex notions of disability embodiment through art-ones that give a fuller sense of the disabled body's variability? The Bodies of Work Festival of Disability Arts and Culture, which ran 15-25 May 2013 in Chicago, Illinois, explored these and other significant questions. The festival contained an extraordinary series of events, including film, dance, theater, and an art exhibition. My time at the festival included participation on an opening panel that discussed current questions in disability art and culture; attending the theater performances Still/Alice (a play staged about early onset Alzheimer's) and Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (featuring the Australian theater company Back to Back, and largely acted by actors with intellectual disabilities); the dance performance Counter Balance IV; a reading by Susan Nussbaum from her 2013 novel about disability culture Good Kings Bad Kings; and viewing the art exhibition Humans Being II, curated by artist Riva Lehrer. This comment is a state of the (disability) art report based on my five days at the festival and it asks: what are the exciting areas where disability culture's body of work in the visual arts is being invigorated and challenged? What are some of the emergent ideas that the rest of us can carry forward, even if we did not attend the festival itself ? For me, the festival queried the writing of disability history, expanded how we might innovate within disability aesthetics, and engaged controversial topics in disability representation. What follows is a series of observations and interpretive fragments-my thoughts on the responses that I think the festival offered to the very questions it raised.Writing Disability Histories, Political and PersonalHow do we continue to bring forward hidden histories? In other words, how do we do disability historiography, balancing the reality of oppression while also showing strategies for subversion and empowerment?For example, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich fantastically imagines the Indian God Ganesh coming to earth to reclaim the swastika from Nazi misappropriation, and brought to life the history of disabled people in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. It vividly portrayed Ganesh's guide as an intellectually disabled man whose loyalty to family and faith reflect his agency and personhood. Even as the play told the story of the eugenicist roots of the Holocaust, it put an individuated face on the disabled victims of genocide.Such nuance and complexity were likewise present in works of visual art on display in Humans Being II. For example, MK Czerwiec's graphic novel, Taking Turns: A Careography (from which original drawings were on display), depicts an oral history of the HIV/AIDS unit on which the author worked, using the vivid colors and forms of the graphic novel to bring it to life. The graphic novel is not a new form for disability narratives, but the intersecting stories of patients, caregivers, and administrators give a complex chronicling of HIV/AIDS from multiple perspectives: the individual, social, and medical. If the visual arts can be a place to make the disabled body known, then it follows they can be a place that further acknowledges the intersecting histories of diverse disability experiences, those lived personally as well as those lived in relationship to disabled people.Whose disability is it, anyway? How can art help us explore the complexities of self-advocacy? Susan Nussbaum read from her groundbreaking novel Good Kings Bad Kings (2013) for the first time at the festival; this novel, the first of this kind coming from within and focusing on disability culture, tells the story of a group of children and young adults living in a Chicago "care" facility that is, in effect, an institution. …