Bree Hadley – PERFORMING MOBILITIES http://performingmobilities.mickdouglas.net Fri, 02 Oct 2015 07:06:16 +0000 en-AU hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.2 http://performingmobilities.mickdouglas.net/wp-content/uploads/webFiles/cropped-PM_ico_02-32x32.jpg Bree Hadley – PERFORMING MOBILITIES http://performingmobilities.mickdouglas.net 32 32 Unfamiliar Destinations http://performingmobilities.mickdouglas.net/symposium/assembly_symposium/unfamiliar-destinations/ Fri, 02 Oct 2015 06:51:30 +0000 http://2015.performingmobilities.net/?post_type=procession_symposium&p=1422 Unfamiliar Destinations is the middle of a series of three performance scores/workshops – Unfamiliar Friendships, about meeting people different to us, Unfamiliar Destinations, about moving along paths different to our habitual ones, and Unfamiliar Feelings, about relating, living and loving in ways different to our own habitual ones – that aim to investigate the anxiety provoked by meeting new people, taking new paths, or trying new things.

In Unfamiliar Destinations, a workshop process, with a participant group in a space with realia/symbolic resources, provides a mixed group with an opportunity to improvise textual, visual and/or movement responses to the idea of a difficult journey, and find different paths to overcome difficulty in a journey. Operating metonymically, the workshop process allows a single small-scale incident or episode to stand in for a much wider range of difficult journeys, for a wide range of different individuals, with different identity positions, and different barriers to mobility. The score has previously been presented at Disability/Culture: New Grounds 2015 practice-led research symposium, University of Michigan.

]]> Unfamiliar Destinations is the middle of a series of three performance scores/workshops – Unfamiliar Friendships, about meeting people different to us, Unfamiliar Destinations, about moving along paths different to our habitual ones, and Unfamiliar Feelings, about relating, living and loving in ways different to our own habitual ones – that aim to investigate the anxiety provoked by meeting new people, taking new paths, or trying new things.

In Unfamiliar Destinations, a workshop process, with a participant group in a space with realia/symbolic resources, provides a mixed group with an opportunity to improvise textual, visual and/or movement responses to the idea of a difficult journey, and find different paths to overcome difficulty in a journey. Operating metonymically, the workshop process allows a single small-scale incident or episode to stand in for a much wider range of difficult journeys, for a wide range of different individuals, with different identity positions, and different barriers to mobility. The score has previously been presented at Disability/Culture: New Grounds 2015 practice-led research symposium, University of Michigan.

]]> Performing Immobility / Protesting Immobility http://performingmobilities.mickdouglas.net/symposium/assembly_symposium/performing-immobility-protesting-immobility/ Fri, 02 Oct 2015 07:06:16 +0000 http://2015.performingmobilities.net/?post_type=procession_symposium&p=1297 Though there is much interest in mobilities as a characteristic of modern, urban, social life today, this is not always matched by attention to immobilities. In this paper, I investigate public space performances designed to draw attention to precisely this counterpoint to current discourses of mobilities – performances about the socially produced immobilities many people with disabilities find as a more fundamental feature of day-to-day life, the fight for mobility, and the freedom found when accommodations for alternative mobilities are made available.

Although public policy is increasingly aligned with a social model of disability, which sees disability as socially constructed through systems, institutions and infrastructure deliberately designed to exclude specific bodies – stairs, curbs, queues and so forth – and although governments in the USA, UK and, to a lesser degree, Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth nations, aim to address these inequalities, the experience of immobility is still every-present for many people. This often comes not just from pain, or from impairment, or even from lack of accommodations for alternative mobilities, but from fellow social performers’ antipathy to, appropriation of, or destruction of accommodations designed to facilitate access for a range of different bodies in public space, and thus the public sphere.

The archetypal instance of this tension is the antipathy many able bodied people feel towards the provision of disabled parking spaces. I examine a number of protest performances in public space, in which activists present actions to give bystanders, passersby and spectators, as well as antagonistic fellow social performers, a sense of what socially produced immobility feels like. I examine responses to such protest performances, and what they say about the potential social, political and ethical impacts of such protests, in terms of their potential to produce new attitudes to mobility, alternative mobility, and access to alternative modes of mobility.

]]> Though there is much interest in mobilities as a characteristic of modern, urban, social life today, this is not always matched by attention to immobilities. In this paper, I investigate public space performances designed to draw attention to precisely this counterpoint to current discourses of mobilities – performances about the socially produced immobilities many people with disabilities find as a more fundamental feature of day-to-day life, the fight for mobility, and the freedom found when accommodations for alternative mobilities are made available.

Although public policy is increasingly aligned with a social model of disability, which sees disability as socially constructed through systems, institutions and infrastructure deliberately designed to exclude specific bodies – stairs, curbs, queues and so forth – and although governments in the USA, UK and, to a lesser degree, Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth nations, aim to address these inequalities, the experience of immobility is still every-present for many people. This often comes not just from pain, or from impairment, or even from lack of accommodations for alternative mobilities, but from fellow social performers’ antipathy to, appropriation of, or destruction of accommodations designed to facilitate access for a range of different bodies in public space, and thus the public sphere.

The archetypal instance of this tension is the antipathy many able bodied people feel towards the provision of disabled parking spaces. I examine a number of protest performances in public space, in which activists present actions to give bystanders, passersby and spectators, as well as antagonistic fellow social performers, a sense of what socially produced immobility feels like. I examine responses to such protest performances, and what they say about the potential social, political and ethical impacts of such protests, in terms of their potential to produce new attitudes to mobility, alternative mobility, and access to alternative modes of mobility.

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