Reviews

Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape by Petra Kuppers

ottinye's review

challenging dark emotional informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

Some really interesting insights into community arts - how we connect, interdisciplinary practice, how we perform and bring up histories sensitively and respectively, the ethics of a shared practice amongst different races, genders, disabilities etc, how culture/history/place informs performance - specifically what this means in terms of disability and how a space can be transformed. Definitely left me with lots of good ideas for carrying out my own workshops and what your goal should/could be for a workshop session.
My one bugbear was the inaccessibility of certain sections due to what I felt was an over complication of theory. Particularly with regards to deleuze and guattari philosophy. The concept of the rhizomatic model is super interesting but I really only got a gist of the argument and individual pages were so hard to understand and the writing felt so intense, jumbled and simply too dense to understand. I wanted to entirely get what was being spoken about but felt it could have been explained more clearly and accessibly.
Overall though a really useful read for practitioners/performance artists/ activists/ disability rights advocates