Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Aberystwyth University
Brighton Beach : This piece of practice as research was made by the disabled dance author Edward Wadsworth with Cyrff Ystwyth, in which Ames is principal research investigator and director. Its significance is its appropriation of techniques of performance, in particular by a disabled person, to produce alternative self-representation and a theatre that suggests a new framework sited between Applied Theatre practice and mainstream performance.
Performance work by Edward Wadsworth with Cyrff Ystwyth, in which Ames is principal research investigator and director. (Performed in Aberystwyth University, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies June 10th and 11th 2009). This piece of practice as research was made by the disabled dance author Edward Wadsworth working alongside Ames, acting as Principal Investigator and director. The research sought to advance further understanding of the forms of physical performance that artists with learning disabilities may produce. A particular concern was to limit the focus on sociological discourses of benefit, palliative intervention and disability rights. How might we perceive a new beauty? Within this question then a further enquiry emerges: what might be the function of new performance in rural Wales? How might elements of the autobiographical embodied by disabled and untrained performers, emerging from the cultural conditions and tensions that exist in the west of Wales, react with the discourse of theatre and performance within these traditions? This work foregrounds concerns with the aesthetics of the performing body and the philosophical discourse of self-representation; and it interrogates the place of the untrained and disabled body in the theatrical arena and proposes a resistance to the consumption of the virtuosic performing body. The performers' physicalities, marked through a discourse of difference, propose an alternative beauty in performance. The research interrogates usual considerations of material within the mainstream paradigms of theatre and dance. Rather than asking who is performing what within a social framework, the research asks what might this new performance bring to the choreographical and dramaturgical field, to its terms and conditions?