Decolonizing Relaxed Performance: A Visual Translation of Vital Ecosystems

Abstract

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.

Misfits Meet Art and Technology: Cripping Transmethodologies

“…As the case studies we have selected show, the creatively disruptive ways disabled artists access, use, create, and interact with technology confound eugenic-norms governing western understandings of embodiment and with this, the euro-masculine-abled subject’s privileged status as authoritative architect-arbiter of “knowledge” and “culture” ( Braidotti, 2013 ; Chen, 2012 ). Disability arts works to pry open spaces of knowledge and cultural production for non-normative creativities to presence and activate our abounding vitalities ( Collins et al, 2022 ; Collins et al, 2023a & 2023b ; Johnson et al, 2024 ; Rice, Pendleton Jiménez, et al, 2020 ; Rice et al, 2017 ; Taylor et al, 2023 ).…”