Through the Communal Knowledge programme artist Patrick Staff will develop a range of choreographic strategies - including, but not exclusive to, group meetings and discussion, dance works, photography and video - to form an intersectional questioning of how bodies are presented, produced, represented and assessed in the fields of performance and dance; healthcare and therapy; technology; and labour.
The conversations, workshops and research engages questions of how neoliberalism imagines and composes embodied identities, and how systems may work to (re)produce naturalised constructions of an able-body. This research draws on queer and disability studies, seeking to question notions of a 'compulsory able-bodiedness'* in its sites of production equally to its representation, and how ultimately it is embedded in complex economic, social and cultural relations.
*McRuer, R (2006). *Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York and London: New York University Press.