Chronic Pain Performance

Description

As part of the Performance and Disability Working Group, I presented a performance lecture online.

Abstract
This performance lecture explores and enacts how chronic pain can be a collaborator in performance practice. By focusing on my practice-led research into working creatively with chronic pain, I discuss and embody conceptualisations of cripping performance.
I am a queer-disabled artist-researcher working across theatre, choreography, and live art. I have lived with chronic pain for over 20 years. Until recently, I related to my pain solely as a barrier to my life and work. Six years ago, I began to turn towards my pain differently, asking how can I work with, rather than despite/against, my pain? I have explored what kinds of aesthetics and practices – what ways of doing performance - emerge when the chronic pain body is embraced as valid and knowledgeable. I have developed performance/choreographic tasks that enable the expression, qualities and skills of chronic pain bodies (Hopfinger 2021, 123). Using and developing this approach, I created my solo performance 'Pain and I' (an award-winning internationally touring piece). Pain and I explores the rich complexities of living with pain, involving choreography that explores the limits and possibilities of my chronic pain body and intimate autobiographical text framed as a love letter to my pain. Drawing from this work, crip art-activist thought (Kafer 2013; Clare 2017; Kafai 2021) and leading UK crip artists (Dan Daw, Claire Cunningham), I argue that cripping performance is about moving beyond access/inclusion to a politics of embracing disability as knowledge that can undo ableist performance paradigms and reconfigure value systems.

Period	8 Jul 2026
Event title	IFTR 2026: What Theatre Does
Event type	Conference
Location	Melbourne & Online, AustraliaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International