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What are you looking at?: Staring down notions of the disabled body in dance
- Source: Choreographic Practices, Volume 6, Issue 1, Apr 2015, p. 25 - 40
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- 01 Apr 2015
Abstract
Abstract
This article considers the display of the disabled body in dance performance. I use Heidi Latsky’s Five Open Mouths as an example of how staging physical otherness can be an act of provocation that reframes conventional perceptions of the disabled dancing body. I draw on cultural critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s construct of the ‘baroque stare’ as a prolonged and engaged visual encounter between seer and seen. Used productively in dance, this stare helps viewers recognize how they experience seeing and holds potential as a generative site for renegotiating social, cultural and aesthetic assumptions about the disabled body.
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