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Dancing Autism: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Bedlam Petra Kuppers Version of record first published: 26 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: Petra Kuppers (2008): Dancing Autism: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Bedlam , Text and Performance Quarterly, 28:1-2, 192-205

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Dancing Autism: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Bedlam Petra Kuppers

This essay reads Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and a dance performance by the Houston-based group FrenetiCore as sites at which autism is under construction.

Keywords: Autism; Disability; Literature; Performance; Dance; Mark Haddon; FrenetiCore

In this essay, I discuss the performance potential of autism: prodded into this enquiry

by a dance show I witnessed, I am intrigued by the ways that mental health as

metaphor can influence representational and performance practice. Images of autism surround us, in an age when the frequency of diagnosis of

conditions associated with the autistic spectrum is growing. Books such as The

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (Haddon) make it onto best-seller lists

and university courses. While autism touches many people’s lives, its definition,

expression, and treatment are very much under debate. People living with the

diagnosis, such as Donna Williams, Eric Chen, Jim Sinclair, Dawn Prince-Hughes,

and Temple Grandin, write and speak about the lack of fit between popular rhetoric

surrounding autism and the experience of it, and about the negative effects that crude

or narrow definitions of ‘‘emotion’’ have for people who live life differently. The

fiction, creative non-fiction, and film worlds feed on the strange conundrum that

(stereotypes of) autistic people as savants, gifted yet locked away, alienated yet

brilliant, pose to representation. In much of my previous work, I discuss representations of disability by disabled

people: the feints and tactics we employ to undermine and challenge existing

Petra Kuppers is Associate Professor of English, Theatre and Dance, Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. The author would like to thank Kathy Mancuso for their discussions about autism, dance, and access. Correspondence to: Department of English, 3216 Angell Hall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109- 1003, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) # 2008 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/10462930701754465

Text and Performance Quarterly Vol. 28, Nos. 1!2, January!April 2008, pp. 192!205

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stereotypes, while acknowledging the continuing hold and power of these images over our own narratives, too. In this essay, my strategy is different: I am focusing not on art work created by people who live with diagnoses of autism, but on representations that make autism a central metaphor, acted out, narrated, and danced by non- disabled people (who have significant experience of people who live with the diagnosis). In this essay, I open possible paths in the treatment of autism through a discussion of a highly successful mainstream representation, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. In the main part of the essay, I will compare these uses and presentations of autism with an underground performance art piece that combines dance and film. The differences I note are of course preprogrammed by the generic home of the material: a best-selling novel tends to feature unity and narrational clarity, and an avant-garde performance piece presents a more kaleidoscopic, fractured world-view which demands more labor on the part of its witness. But how exactly autism and mental health feature in the set-up of these generic tones shall be the object of my investigation. The Incident is a novel by a British author which focuses on 15-year-old

Christopher, the main character and narrator, who lives with Asperger’s syndrome, one of many diagnoses on the autistic spectrum. Mark Haddon, who worked with people with different mental health disorders earlier in his career, never mentions the world ‘autism’ in the novel, and has indeed expressed surprise in interviews that he would now be called upon as a specialist. Even so, the novel has become a major touchstone in public debates surrounding the diagnosis. In the novel, Christopher uses his non-normative way of making sense of the world

to unravel the mysterious death of a dog*and through this, presents a view of suburban Britain (a very recognizable Swindon: a modern, often soulless satellite of London) and its rules and regulations. Christopher tells the reader how he thinks: numbers, colors, and rules make up his life, and he is emotionally disassociated (sort of), yet able to analyze the behavior of those around him in minute detail. He does not like to be touched, rocks and moans when over-stimulated, and he does not understand metaphors, and thus ruminates quite amusingly about the meaning of strange phrases he encounters as people speak to him. The book was a smash hit, and received numerous awards. Why? To begin with, the strange voice is compelling in its otherness, and yet in its deep

familiarity. ‘‘As if one is in the character’s head’’ is something many reviewers comment on. This is a child, learning adult rules, and also a disabled character, with all the voyeurism that attracts, but, beyond that, an everyman who takes onto himself all the narrational weight so many disabled characters have to carry in literature: being the alienated lens through which to see clearly the lay of the land. And this is indeed what makes Christopher so compelling: his distanced view of the rules that make up love, relationships, need, and care rings so true, and seems so perceptive. I would also venture that another main draw that makes Incident such a success is

its narrational glimpse of a possible simplicity. For Christopher, things that are mysterious follow rules he has not quite worked out yet. Nothing is unknowable, just not yet understood. However, rules can be charted, and as we enter the world of the

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novel, the rules indeed become good predictors of what might or might not happen, of responses and reactions: what was unfamiliar becomes very familiar, and Christopher’s world is navigable. He explains so well:

You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk. (Haddon 4)

If that is the way this novel’s world works, it is quite comforting in a world of novel- writing in which renditions of modern life alienation are usually so much less pleasurable. The Incident has many elements of an inverted aphorism: truths are told inverted, slanted, yet always recognizable (‘‘pedantic language’’ is one of the diagnostic categories for Asperger’s: Haddon very effectively walks the tightrope between boredom and repetition, and infuses his character’s speech patterns with enough range and deep curiosity to keep us engaged). How to make a world legible, understandable: that is the journey readers go on. Compared to the complexity of life as most of us know it, Christopher’s world, in which a certain number of red cars seen in the morning make for a good day, a different number of yellow cars a bad one, has quite an appeal. Autism does not become cuddly, quite, but it becomes a rather nostalgic lens through which a complex world can be made to distill itself into some semblance of wondrous order. Incident has met with criticism from people living with the diagnosis, even though

many praise its focus on making this autistic person self-directed, able to lead a full life, and a complex and interesting figure. Eric Chen has written Mirror Mind, a book of poems and critical writings, about his experiences of living with autism. In a review of Incident, he questions the novel’s way of normalizing Christopher, and he offers a number of re-writes: he looks at a passage from Incident, and then writes how he thinks the material in the passage could be rewritten from his own perspective. Of course, as he acknowledges himself, the aim of this exercise is to educate people about autism, not to write a best-selling novel. Here is one of the four passages he rewrites, complete with his commentary. In this

passage, Incident and Chen focus on one of the savant-like features often associated with the diagnosis: the seeming super-human ability to process mathematical data, combined with a supposed lack of ability to comprehend or work with emotional and metaphorical data (a combination at the heart of one of the first mass-market presentations of autism, the film Rain Man).

And he said, ‘‘What’s 251 times 864?’’ And I thought about this and I said:

‘‘216,864’’. Because it was a really easy sum because you just multiply 864"1000 which is 864,000. Then you divide it by 4 which is 216,000 and that’s 250 "864. Then you add another 864 on to it and get 251 "864. And that’s 216,864. (Haddon, 2003: 84)

The paragraph shows Christopher working logically through the sums. Although autistics often reason with logic, their logic is often of a different quality. There are

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many autistics who accept queer ideas and persist with them despite convincing argument. Yes, they are logical, but no, their logic is not necessarily of high quality.

However, concede that it is possible an autistic would reason like the above if he had received sufficient training. But this is an exception, not the rule.

Autistic savants do not use logic, because it is too slow. They often tap into the parallel processing power of the brain, using the visual processors of their brain. If I

could rewrite this paragraph, perhaps it might read like this:

And he said, ‘‘What’s 251 times 864?’’ As Christopher heard this, in his mind

appeared two green shapes that looked a lot like uneven cubes. The shapes clashed into each other and rippled with lots of tiny cubes, squares and triangles. Eventually a new shape was formed. Christopher replied: ‘‘216,864’’.

He was shocked. ‘‘Wow, that’s even faster than a calculator. How did you do it?’’

Christopher was puzzled and thought carefully about what he meant. Perhaps he was asking who solved the sum. ‘‘I did.’’

‘‘I mean, what trick did you use?’’ It took a while for Christopher to understand

what he said. Maybe he means, tricks as in cheating. So he means did Christopher cheat. ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘I don’t get it,’’ he declared. And to this very day, he

still could not figure out Christopher’s secrets.

As a side-note, an autistic has to struggle to understand human speech, especially the context behind every word. The smooth flow of thoughts and the apparent ease of understanding human speech are highly unrealistic experiences for an autistic. (Chen, 2006)

Chen’s rewriting of Incident, in this passage and others, focuses a lot more on presenting the lacunae and missed connections between a persona living with the diagnosis and someone who does not. As such, his writing aims to present the experience of autism, as he perceives it, but it clearly also makes for a less compelling, more pedantic, slower moving, and more frustrating read. But then, missed connections do slow down communication, speed up frustration, endanger the pleasure of solution: and this experiential effect of being in the presence of autism, both as a lived experience and as a conglomeration of signs, finds expression in the avant-garde performance I turn to next. If Incident presents a form of domesticised autism, makes it commensurate and

graspable, other representations seem to dither more fruitfully, and leave more room between the words and the potential lives of people diagnosed with autism. To order, to make chaotic: the question autism poses to the non-disabled world can be answered in many different ways. Autism has currency in performance: quite powerfully in the public eye, quite

performative, and recognizably ‘enactable’ (pace Dustin Hoffman), it has found ways onto the stage. Societas Rafaello Sanzio, an Italian-based avant-garde experimental

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theatre company, made their Hamlet an autistic character, rocking by himself on an

electrified bedstead (Hamlet: The Vehement Exteriority of the Death of a Mollusc, 1992

onwards). Not all is well in Denmark, indeed, and the world is out of joint. Here,

autism is a radical tragedy, deep alienation and non-living life. At other times, autism

on the stage becomes an opportunity for angel beings to move among us: and

projections of innocence and savants can become a disrespectful and annoying

representation of disability (see, for instance, Adler). But in the show I would like to

discuss, no clear answers emerge about the nature of autism: no narrative, no

solution*but something moves. In the dance/film show Bedlam, presented by dance company FrenetiCore in

Houston, Texas, in June 2006, mental health and autism become lenses and

metaphors, and rehearse histories of connections between dance, film, ‘‘madness,’’

and the gothic genre. Autism is a core organizing metaphor, although magic realism

disrupts any sense of someone autistic being realistically presented on stage. This is

not a show that tries to educate about autism. Autism instead becomes an organizing

principle, a trope from which dance, film, and performance spring. The company

describes the show in these terms:

A magic urban realist tale performed with original music, narration, and both live and filmed dance. A young autistic finds herself within the walls of Bedlam Asylum. Troubled by the stirrings of her lost memories, she joins with two hyper-medicated and delusional mental patients. Together they must create an alternate reality to banish their inner demons. Joined by a supporting cast of characters, real and imaginary. (Publicity material)

FrenetiCore’s Bedlam. Photo Anthony Rathbun, reproduced with permission.

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Rebekah French’s choreography embraces a number of kinesthetic or communica- tional strategies that are commonly associated with the range of conditions named in the autistic spectrum: being alone, sensitivity to touch, distance, an avoidance of face- to-face communication, and no eye contact. The draw of Bedlam rests in the juxtaposition of an intricate and inventive

choreography, and overall carefully calibrated attention to visual qualities, in particular the materiality and color-richness of Robert Thoth’s video and the dancers’ costumes (created by Ashley Horn, who also dances the protagonist’s part), with the less intricate, more conventional features of filmic narrative. Narrative film has many conventionalized ways of knowing mental health, of preparing stories for our consumption, and Thoth’s material can draw on these stories to create a gothic frame for Bedlam. If Haddon called upon Asperger’s syndrome to create a character sifting the world, Thoth calls upon autism to hammer home alienation and the melodrama of distress. However, multiple layers of meaning open up in the show, and dance has a different history of representing precarious mental health. Dance also has a different way of establishing empathy or connection between audience and performer, and can draw upon different registers for making meaning. In Bedlam, between film’s and dance’s respective ways of knowing, an interesting image emerges. At the opening of the performance, the audience finds itself in a dark and

cavernous space, with huge fans moving hot air about in one of the few spaces in Houston’s summer without air conditioning. As the artistic director informs us, we are also in a new theatre space: the show is the first performance in the company’s new home, a huge warehouse on Houston’s east side. The dancers themselves worked hard as builders to create the performance space. This information gives a different flavor to my attention to the event, a different sense of site-specificity. Space, ways of being in space, and space’s architectural framing and translation are core players in this performance. The traces of this collaboration and labor are noticeable everywhere: in the

improvisational nature of the bathrooms, the loose seats for the audience, and in the way that the shallowly sprung floor rests (and resounds) on the old warehouse floor. On the margin of the city of Houston, in a space marginally inviting to human habitation, FrenetiCore play out their tale of human marginality. The show opens with the projection of a brightly-colored image onto a white

scrim, hung in gentle folds from the high warehouse roof, clearly dividing the space. The image on the screen is flickering, oscillating between different screen ratios, and audience members might well wonder if there are technical difficulties*but the flicker and ratio jump remain constant throughout the show, and become expressive of the material features of the projection itself: they foreground the screened nature of the material, just as the gentle folding scrim weaves materiality, moving presence and weight into the beam of information light, the disembodied video projection. The image shows a young woman (Ashley Horn, playing a character named Ash)

in a graveyard, a huge expanse of bright green, occasionally dotted with grey stones. She stands, hovering as if undecided. In a second sequence, we see her throwing herself into an open grave. Around her, ghosts flicker: the kind of invisible

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displacements fast-moving figures create when a film or video is slowed down. The

woman is apart, out of synch, out of time*but she is the only human presence visible to us, as everyday people going about their everyday business, the ‘‘normates,’’

are nothing but substance-less shadows. Difference, and being-out-of-touch/vision/

hearing, begin to emerge. These manipulated images on the screen grow dark, and the stage in front of the

scrim fills up with dancers, all in dirty white clothes, moving across in strange and

compelling formation. One movement motif is a sequence where one dancer sits on

the ground, hugging her bent legs closely to herself, rocking backward and forward.

Another dancer comes near, although not too close, and grabs one of the legs, which

becomes extended away from the still hugged body. He or she pulls the dancer across

the floor, not unkindly, without violence, merely matter of fact, until the dancer

twists out of this strange grip. The show’s publicity material gives me an explanatory framework: the young

woman, Ash, who is to become the central character, is playing an autistic girl, locked

in an institution. In interviews with the choreographer, I learn that Ashley Horn is

also a dance teacher, and that she worked for years one-on-one with an autistic young

man (as a creative artist, not a dance therapist). And indeed, many of the movements

I see seem to emerge from choreographic instructions that metaphorise and embody

autistic diagnostic phenomena: holding on to extended legs is a means of transport

and connection, embodying both resistance to touch and the strangeness and

‘‘unnaturalness’’ of bodily connection. There is no hand-holding here, and little of the

FrenetiCore’s Bedlam. Photo Anthony Rathbun, reproduced with permission.

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F re n et iC o re ’s B ed la m . P h o to

A lm

a R o sa s, re p ro d u ce d w it h p er m is si o n .

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generous body-on-body contact so familiar in contemporary dance. Twisting away

and turning are the core patterns I see in the duet and ensemble material. Another feature of the choreography is unusual pointe work (elevation from full

foot onto the toes, made possible by training and by reinforced ballet shoes). Clearly

ballet-trained performers move from the self-contained, twisting floor work and self-

hugging into pointe*twisted onto their fronts, their feet move nearer to their upper body, elevating the torso supported by their hands. From flat foot they move on to

pointe, until they look like strange spiders, skittering backwards on hands and toes.

This is pointe on a low level, close to the ground. The upright walking dancers also

elevate. This allows for play between jarring, contrasting movements: the light,

floating pointe-work of a Swan Lake corps-de-ballet and the other main movement

quality expressed in the sequences of upright walking*speedy, space-eating jumps across the stage which look more like escape attempts, only to be arrested by a twist

into one’s own body and back onto the ground. The overall effect of the movement

vocabulary of the show is unfamiliarity: at no point does the stage spectacle fall into

the familiar sequences, jumps, and energies of modern dance, ballet, contact, or

butoh. The choreography tweaks conventional forms, and it is easy to see this

strangeness, this slight dislocation, as a commentary on the disassociation of autistic

patterns. Among the company are two male dancers. One, again clearly trained, also elevates

on pointe shoes, further heightening the jarring, unconventional use of the form,

which is not often used for male movement. The other male dancer is a rangy large

man, moving in the background, his physicality deeply at odds with the small-framed

FrenetiCore’s Bedlam. Photo Anthony Rathbun, reproduced with permission.

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and lithe dancers*and his presence sets off interesting vibrations of curiosity, dread, or infiltration (a point made by students in a Disability Culture course who visited the performance with me, and who are becoming trained in reading bodily signs as cultural scripts and as performance choices that play with these scripts). Support and compulsion emerge around this tall and large dancer, as he repeatedly lifts other, smaller dancers, or becomes part of the supporting dancers into whom an elevated mover crashes from above. In an initiation scene reminiscent of the ballet Rites of Spring, Ash is held high, not

allowed to walk or touch the ground, her body rotating above the others. Although she is held, none of these touches are emphatic, emotional, or laden with connection: they remain formal, on a strange edge between intimacy, support, and the fulfillment of a rule. All dancers are clad in off-white clothing, with dresses that echo both hospital

gowns and medical white coats. Indeed, the boundaries between roles such as inmate or doctor/nurse are blurred. Within this scene, Ash is singled out: she alone is dressed in a darker shade, a blue-grey material, and she is dancing bare-foot in contrast to the tubular whitish pointe shoes worn by the company (made to look patched and well- worn, with clear tape acting both as stiffener and as a visual highlight, catching the light and reflecting it). At the end of the scene, the dancers flee, leaving the protagonist alone in the middle of the stage. As Ash stands alone, someone throws a blue-grey pair of pointe-shoes at her: her entry into the movement canon of the asylum. What autism is seems to be much less the issue in this show than what autism does:

the movement-based, interactive or representational straightjackets that it offers for social engagement and interaction. The dance scenes give way to filmic sequences, which often take place in another

warehouse, well lit and bright. Visual confinement emerges in this filmed site through various strategies: the bright spaces are often rectangular, with either barred windows or large rectangular wall-areas squeezing the characters visually into the margins, onto beds, or onto the ground. In the films, the movement is more pedestrian and everyday, and when dance occurs on screen, it is a less elaborately choreographed use of everyday movement or stylizations of child’s play, augmented by speed up or slow down of the video material. In one of the dance sequences on film, Ash, another female inmate (Mary), and the small man who danced on pointe shoes (Bernie) are moving across an industrial field of abandoned plastics: barrels of stacked material made into high hills, bundled and stable enough to climb. The dance sees the three moving up and down over this terrain, climbing and releasing, and the film stock runs backwards, with the effect that the jumps and supported descents from the fabric bales look unnatural, counter to the laws of gravity. The plastic storage area is a world of magic realism, of impossible and yet shared

dreams: an escape hatch from the asylum (located in a broom-closet) leads to this post-industrial wasteland/playground, and the three inmates crawl out of the framed door onto grass, soil, and waste: the screen shows an explosion of color and shape after the strict geometrics of the asylum/warehouse. The site is an abandoned plastic

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recycling facility in Houston, left untouched since 1978: persistence, haunting, and

the keeping alive of memories are site-specific themes in here. And it is not hard to

read this sequence in the abandoned plastics works as a comment on ecology and

autism: the presence of toxic plastic compounds is just one of many narratives that

surround the ever-multiplying diagnoses of autism. However, these messages about

cause and effect, narrative development and explanatory scheme, are merely

subliminal: the show does not offer pat narratives about autism, but allows its

viewers to enter into a landscape where media images, movement patterns, gothic

narratives, and stereotypes about mental health glide into each other. No pointe work occurs in the film, which can rely on temporal technical features

and on more established generic conventions to signal difference and disruption/

establishment of connection. The filmic narrative is loaded with generic features such

as evil and non-understanding asylum doctors and ‘‘Nurse Ratchetts,’’ and

stereotypical images of asylum inmates eating the pieces of a board game and

throwing them around (played by young men who do not appear live on stage).

Other conventional images include gothic atmospheres and claustrophobic family

situations. In one scene, clearly modeled on early film ‘‘young innocent/tragic

childhood drama’’ lines, a mother leaves her two daughters at home to go off to work,

advising one child to give the other one her medication punctually, ‘‘else she will not

wake up again’’*and of course the young child plays on the floor while the arms of the house clock go around and around, until we see her beside the bed of her sibling,

distraught, stuffing medication into the mouth of the inanimate, dark-grey-faced girl.

This scene, presented in the filmic narrative towards the end of the performance,

gives a supposed narrative backup to the female protagonist, and her initial desire to

throw herself into the grave*and yet, this psychological motive of guilt and withdrawal, which echoes hysteria and ‘‘muting’’ in films such as The Spiral Staircase,

does not rhyme easily with the autism language employed in the choreographic

material. One of the live dance sequences makes connections between the pointe material,

the tradition of ballet, and the tradition of women in peril, in madness, and in death:

a trio of women dance in white costumes, one of which at least looks like a romantic

bridal gown, while the others are in more modern-connoted fashion outfits. All three

are made up with large black rings around their eyes over their chalk-white makeup,

and it is easy for me to see them as Willis: as the dead brides come back to haunt the

living, and to dance hauntingly among the trees. Giselle, Swan Lake, and others: the

connection between these romantic ballets and psycho-pathological diagnoses are

well-established in dance studies. Scholars point to the diagnostic categories for

hysteria developing in a similar time frame as the choreographies of romantic ballet,

thereby establishing a vocabulary for women as tender plants, psychologically and

physiologically endangered, and deranged by their frustrated sexual urges (see, for

instance, Beizer and McCarren). Bedlam can dance with these meaning of romantic

ballet images. Similar characters, all in white with white makeup and dark eye-rings,

appear in the filmic material: a young woman (the dead sister of the protagonist)

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F re n et iC o re ’s B ed la m . P h o to

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appears in jumping imagery, echoing the horror film The Ring’s use of film speed and

flicker to scare us and the protagonist. The larger man I and my students noted earlier also appears in this costume, and

when he enters the film, I am reminded more of Dia de Los Muertos figures than

Willis: he comes both as lover and as death, ambiguous and ambivalent. That is also

his role in another live dance sequence, which centers on another character: a young

man, Bernie, who is portrayed in the filmic material as a stereotypical maniac who

uses paper boxes attached to his head to avoid vibrations/radio-waves/bad influences:

again, a stereotypical narrative of mental illness. His screen image gains weight and a very different presence in the dance number

that follows his screen narrative where he uses dream fantasies to escape the asylum’s

regime. In the live dance, he enters the stage alone, dressed in a tight, black matador-

like costume, and he moves in ways that connote queer-identified dance steps. He

fully acknowledges the audience, flirts with us, and dances for us with gaiety and

abandon, disrupting the sense of the gothic macabre that has settled with the filmic

material. He is alive, and soon joined by the company, all beautifully dressed in wild

and colorful costumes. The large man dances with them, and lifts the small man,

supportive and tender. This dance sequence, with its color and life, portrays a very

different image of mental illness, still within metaphor (and in particular exploiting

notions of mental health difference as a foreign country) but much more positively

connoted. Between the different stereotypes and generic narratives of mental health,

the dance always wins out (from the perspective of someone interested in disability

culture): although gorgeously filmed and architecturally exciting, the filmic narrative

with its verbal cues and acted scenes falls short of the visceral and kinesthetic

information of the dance material. Between these two poles, I am intrigued by the

choreographic possibilities of mental health metaphors. In Bedlam, autism emerges as a category within visions of the asylum: a place

apart, in metaphor, sitedness, and emotional connect. The asylum offers asylum and

separation, and, witnessing the show from a crip perspective, I find the disconnects

across spectacle and audience so much more intriguing than any acted-out

disconnects between performers or actors. What do audiences come to feel in the

presence of strange pointe work, those moving spiders, these uncomfortable alienated

lifts, these familiar film narratives broken by the joy of live movement, this theatre

space in an empty building, the debris of Houston’s industrial heritage? If Incident

presents the chaos of our world by using a disabled character’s perspective and ability

to make sense strangely, then Bedlam presents a vision on the edge of sensorial

overload, and calls upon its audiences to engage and find pathways through the

discordant but never harsh imagery, sounds, and kinesthetic information. Making up your mind: how much can you open your imagination to autism,

without wishing for secure knowledge? Can art destabilize what we know in ways that

are productive, and generate a more accessible world? In between a novel and a

performance piece, narratives are set adrift. Somewhere, in the play with old stories,

new questions can emerge.

204 P. Kuppers

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References

Adler, Janet. ‘Presence: From Autism to the Discipline of Authentic Movement.’’ Contact Quarterly 31.2 (2006): 11!7.

Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Chen, Eric. Autism Myths. 2006. April 2007Bhttp://iautistic.com/autism-myths-the-curious- incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time.php!.

Chen, Jim. Mirror Mind: Penetratrating Autism’s Enigma. Singapore (self published), 2005. Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures: And Reports From My Life With Autism. New York: Vintage

Books, 1995. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. McCarren, Felicia. Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine. Stanford CA: Stanford

University Press, 1998.

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