When Actions Challenge Theories: the Tactical Performance of Sue Austin

In the 19th century, disability turned into spectacle through the freak shows, where deformities were enjoyed as something extraordinary to be observed. Today these shows are considered immoral and some disabled artists retake the power to exhibit their body to challenge the idea of disabled as “other”. It is the case of Sue Austin, the English artistic director of Freewheeling, a project that transforms the life experience on a wheelchair into a spectacle. She dives into the Red Sea with her underwater wheelchair in “Creating the Spectacle!” or paints through the chair wheels in “Traces from a Wheelchair”. With her performances she dramatizes the vulnerability of the body, claims the power of the chair and brings the audience to an authentic participated dimension. Sue Austin, rewriting the meanings of the disabled body image, gives us the opportunity to think about, by a pedagogical point of view, the potential condition of being a disabled performer and its impact on the spectator perspective of disability. Therefore, her works would be taken as example to wonder about the fine boundary line between disability and talent and to remember that disadvantage and disability, normality and exceptionality may be considered as problems, tasks, specific qualities not of the person, but of the entire network of relationships in which she/he lives. The paper addresses these questions through the principal categories of a personalistic-orientied special pedagogy and the recent results in the field of Performance Studies and its interconnection with the Disability Studies.