Alan Filewod, Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2011).

Abstract

clinical experience is staged in diverse works shifts the focus from the challenges of embodying disability to those of staging the social experience of disability. Johnston compares different examples of this and asks, “How might including disability artists’ voices [. . .] unsettle the ideology of ability at play in clinical encounters, and re-imagine disability as a valued human condition?” (154). By way of conclusion, a chapter comparing disparate performances of disability that happened in the context of the Vancouver Winter Olympics and Paralympics become a way to consider the wide-ranging aesthetic and political strategies of works; these include such disparate performances as a production of The Miracle Worker and a more overtly political theatre piece by Realwheels, Spine. Because of the work’s focus on English-language theatre in Canada, I did find myself curious about whether French-language theatre has a similar disability theatre presence; Johnston’s study posits a model for how someone wishing to take up that question might shape its answer. Her voice throughout the work is lively and accessible; it is difficult to write about performance in a way that can both vividly re-create and analyze works, yet she does so. She engages in critical activism by shaping this important history, and creates these case studies as the basis for larger theoretical discussions that are applicable beyond the Canadian context. Johnston writes, “It has been through disability theatre that I have experienced some of the most affectively powerful innovations in form, reinventions of tradition, and direct challenges to my understanding of humanity both in local contexts and around the world” (xiv); her work honours those traditions by creating a text which will certainly help others assess, conceptualize, and create disability theatres of their own.