Keeping Relaxed Performance Vital: Affective Pedagogy in the Arts

• Published in: Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
• Main Authors: Collins, Kimberlee, Jones, Chelsea Temple, Rice, Carla
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Liverpool University Press 2022
• Subjects: Relaxed Performance; vitality; affect; crip theory; Canada; Nash; Turtle Island; anishina*
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10214/27007; https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2022.14

Relaxed Performance (RP) has emerged as an arts-based praxis implemented across sectors in response to disability and other justice-seeking communities’ desire to access the arts. Across Turtle Island (North America), RP is becoming the “gold standard” for accessible performance arts, as sector norms evolve to demand accessibility and inclusion, prompting a desire for RP training in higher education. The upswell of interest raises concerns that RP is at risk of becoming an increasingly sought-after pedagogical commodity whose vitality could be co-opted in the interests of standardization and universality. Taking up RP as a justice-driven arts intervention, the article argues for maintaining RP’s vitality in the face of access standardization. Drawing on RPs at three universities, the article describes the affective potential of non-standardized and crip theory-informed RP now and in the future. We acknowledge that the research described in this paper took place on Turtle Island in the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe and treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, members of the Three Fires Confederacy. Much of this work focuses on the concept of disability, which is understood in multiple ways, including as a colonial term that conflicts with Indigenous perspectives and is too-often imposed upon Indigenous people who experience mindbody difference (Ineese-Nash). We thank our principal funders British Council Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant Program (# 895-2016-1024). We especially thank the students, professors, practitioners, and Access Activators (trainers) who generously gave of their time and talents.