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 Relaxed Performance (RP) as a justice-driven, arts intervention, we argue for maintaining RP's vitality in the face of access standardization. Drawing on RPs at 1 three universities, we describe the affective potential of non-standardized and crip theory-informed RP now and in the future.
The article reflects on one author’s participation in a project that explored the aesthetics of disability through the production of an accessible, open-access film about disability representation. It evaluates the potential for accessible creative texts produced by disabled media makers to serve as sites of critical, creative intervention. Written by the filmmaker (Muredda) and three researchers (Jones, Zbitnew, and Collins), this reflection draws from the principles of critical accessibility, as well as from scholarship on disability and aesthetics, to examine the intersection of disabled film criticism and textual production. It considers both the potential and the limitations of accessible productions about representation as a rejoinder to a representational tradition that has often implemented the figurative language of disability in functional and regressive ways, largely without input from disabled artists and spectators.
This essay draws on the visual translations produced by artist Sonny Bean in response to the 2022 report, Relaxed Performance: Exploring University-based Training Across Fashion, Theatre and Choir. Relaxed performance (RP) is a wide-reaching movement toward accessibility in arts that challenges normative comportment in performance contexts and has evolved into a contemporary cross-sector vital practice rooted in disability justice. Through a selection of illustrations, Bean transforms human-centric data about RPs into a vital ecosystem that extends to the more-than-human world, denoting the complex interconnectedness of RP production in a settler colonial state.
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