Keeping Relaxed Performance Vital

Abstract

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.

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 ).…”

Revisioning Fitness through a Relational Community of Practice: Conditions of Possibility for Access Intimacies and Body-Becoming Pedagogies through Art Making

“…One enabling component involved intentionally creating a relaxed space that we co-constituted by enacting a disability cultural practice called "relaxed performance" (e.g., Collins et al 2022;Jones et al 2022). Relaxed performance has emerged in the last few decades from a growing recognition of the contributions of disability, d/Deaf, mad, ageing, and fat activist-artists to disability rights and justice movements and the need to educate the mainstream about non-normative cultural practices to improve access to art (LaMarre et al 2021).…”

“…Relaxed performance has emerged in the last few decades from a growing recognition of the contributions of disability, d/Deaf, mad, ageing, and fat activist-artists to disability rights and justice movements and the need to educate the mainstream about non-normative cultural practices to improve access to art (LaMarre et al 2021). As a cultural practice, relaxed performance aims to make art and cultural spaces more accessible through technical modifications, such as dimmed lights, warnings about and/or reductions in loud noises and pyrotechnics, the choice to move freely in and out of the space, and the creation of a "chill-out space" where people can relax, and more (LaMarre et al 2021;Collins et al 2022). Within ReVisioning Fitness, we enacted this practice by encouraging people to engage in the ways that worked for them, including turning their cameras on or off as needed, situating themselves anywhere that made them feel comfortable (e.g., their bed), and inviting freedom to eat/drink, take breaks, and flow in and out of the online meeting space as desired.…”