“When a point goes for a walk”: Accessible Design and the World of the Play
Samuel Yates, PhD
American University
Theater artists and scholars often talk about the “world of the play.” The primary questions that Elinor Fuchs poses in her influential essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” challenge us to articulate a play’s spatio-temporal dynamics, its architecture, its climate. “A play,” Fuchs argues, “is not a flat work of literature.” To apprehend a play’s dimensionality–its world–we need design. And, as Charlene Gross tells us, design begins with a point that takes a walk. But what if that point can’t walk? What if that point must wheel, crawl, crutch, roll, or glide from its starting position? What lines, shapes, forms, and colors do we create when we begin by divesting ourselves of normative body functions, abilities, shapes, and forms?
Designing accessible worlds for disabled artists and spectators requires decentering the able body in our work. What preconceived notions about shape–or shapelessness–do we have as artists that build inhabitable worlds? For whom are our worlds uninhabitable? How do formulations of line, shape, texture, and design impact function, story, information, or character? On its most basic level, lines and shapes are classifiers: a circle (not a square or triangle or other shape), and an orange is most like a circle, therefore, an orange is circular. When we design we make arguments about who belongs in our world. Design communicates what shapes and ways of being are imagined, allowed, and valued. To think “cripistemologically,” as feminist crip/queer scholar Lisa Duggan coined, is to center the perspective of disabled individuals who have to “crip” the world as a creative strategy of survival, access, communication, politics, and joy.
Designing cripistemologically values disabled persons’ participation in the world of the play, and their contributions with the rich, generative creativity that comes from crip forms of knowledge. For example, American Sign Language has over thirty handshapes based on alphanumeric signs that function as the understructure for many other signs. The H handshape–with the thumb, ring, and little fingers pressed against one’s palm while the index and pointer fingers extend in a horizontal line with the palm faces towards the signer–is used for many English words that begin with the letter H, but also signs like CHAIR, RABBIT, SEAT, FUNNY, and even the sign BACON. Each sign carries different weights (mass), movement (line), tone (color and texture), and shape. As an embodied, performed language, ASL teaches us about the storytelling potential of design’s basic elements, using shapes like H, if we imagine them to move from their starting point differently.
Design is a form of knowledge. A good design tells us about the world and our place within it. Design conveys cultural attitudes, priorities, and expectations; when a thing is poorly designed it frustrates and confuses the user, rendering itself inaccessible and redundant. But, if design is an alchemical mix of form and function that instructs us how to use a thing or occupy a space, then it also is a cipher that reveals what kinds of bodies the designer anticipated holding that space or utilizing their tool. When we conceptualize, design, cast, and perform worlds of a play, we are creating a vision not of the world as it is–but the world as it can be. Is your world accessible? Does it value disability as a form of diversity, cultural specificity, and embodied difference?
Work Cited
Fuchs, Elinor. “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play.” Theater 34, no. 2
(2004): 5-9.
BIO
Charlene Gross is an Assistant Professor of Costume Design at Penn State’s School of Theatre. She has taught classes in theatrical makeup, costume technology, crafts, graphic skills, figure drawing, & costume design. She was the recipient of a Carnegie Mellon Grant while at the College of Wooster & is an Innovator-in-Residence at Penn State’s Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design. Charlene’s opera, theatre, & dance credits have been seen on and off Broadway, across the country, and on the West End London stage. She holds a MFA from NYU and is a proud member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829.
Samuel Yates, Ph.D., is an artist and researcher at American University, where he examines the aesthetics of disability and performance in his current project Cripping Broadway: Disability and the American Musical. He received his Ph.D. in English from The George Washington University, where his dissertation research earned the American Society for Theatre Research’s Helen Krich-Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship and the GWU Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship. He completed an M.Phil in Theatre and Performance Studies from Trinity College Dublin as a George J. Mitchell Scholar and a B.A. from Centre College as a John C. Young Scholar. Samuel holds a Humanity in Action Senior Fellowship for his work on performance and body politics, and has artistically collaborated with theaters such as the Abbey Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, The Samuel Beckett Centre, and New Harmony Theater. His current research concerns disability aesthetics and rhetorics in commercial theatre, and asks how our notions of disability and the able body inform and transforms theatrical performance.