Cripping Autobiographical Practice with Elana Binysh*

About this workshop

This is a collaborative workshop developed for Disabled artists, including Neurodivergent artists, interested in making Crip autobiographical work. Within the workshop, participants will explore performance making strategies and norms and find ways to subvert them. 

*Cripping references Crip theory.  

Crip theory is an academic field which Queers disability studies. 

“Queering disability studies or claiming disability in and around queer theory, however, helps create critically disabled spaces overlapping with the critically queer spaces that activists and scholars have shaped during recent decades, in which we can identify and challenge the ongoing consolidation of heterosexual, able-bodied hegemony.”

Robert McRuer

What to expect

A series of exercises facilitated by live artist Elana Binysh.  

The exercises within the workshop are designed to be interpreted in any form. Elana will use autobiographical material, build illogical, unreadable performance scores that allow for mess and failure, and generate content that doesn’t ignore our access needs, and instead uses them as creative tools. Within this workshop, you will make things, share back and discuss what you find. 

The workshop explores techniques Elana has been using during the making of her current work I think it was a feeling: an instruction-based performance and audio work using liquids for audiences to consider their relationship to bodily fluids and shame. The work exists as both a live performance and a headphone piece, to be listened to and followed at home

Who is it for?

This event is designed specifically for Disabled (including Neurodivergent) artists interested in making Crip autobiographical work.

Why join? 

It will be fun.

It will help you see your space in a new way and from a new perspective.

It’s time to be playful and explore in an accessible and restful way.

A chance for you to spend three hours working creatively without suppressing your access needs.

A chance to meet other Disabled creatives and be in community.

A chance to explore new ways of making and learn from each others’ practices.

A chance to play with autobiographical form in a contained way.

What should I prepare to get the most out of the session?

Wear comfortable clothes.

You’ll be thinking about autobiographical experience, and thinking playfully about access needs. So you might want to think about what you want to bring to the space and what your boundaries are.

Bring any snacks or stim toys, or anything else that you need.