Pain and I: A Crip Performance Score

This article explores and develops practices and conceptualisations of cripping choreography through focusing on my practice-led research into collaborating with chronic pain in dance and performance.

As a dance artist and researcher living with chronic pain, over the past five years I have explored what kinds of aesthetics and practices emerge when the chronic pain body is embraced as valid and knowledgeable, developing choreographic tasks that enable the expression, qualities and skills of chronic pain bodies (Hopfinger 2021, 123). This article focuses on a body of work, Pain and I, which I created from these practices.

Pain and I is a performance, audio experience and graphic score: each version 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, Pain and I asks what can pain teach us? Through critically reflecting on this work and drawing from crip activist thought (Kafer 2013; Clare 2017; Kafai 2021) and the work of leading crip artists (Dan Daw, Claire Cuningham, Criptonite) I argue that cripping choreography is about moving beyond access/inclusion to a politics of embracing disability as knowledge that reconfigures ableist performance paradigms and value systems.

By disseminating the practice through a performance score of Pain and I, this article embodies a practice-as-research methodology in its modes of communication.