Lars Waldorf

For the past four weeks or so, I have been watching Sri Lankans of all different shapes, sizes, and abilities practice mirror exercises and try out contact improvisation. But I have been struggling with what to look for and how to articulate what I have seen. I’ve read through Hetty’s observations, I’ve Skyped with Adam, I’ve peeked at Mahesh’s notations, and I’ve pestered Gerda with questions. But I still get distracted by aesthetic associations – seeing “Café Müller” in an improvisation with chairs or “D-Man in the Waters” after a spectacular slide along the floor. What gets lost in such undisciplined inter-disciplinarity is how to identify bodily expressions of empowerment.

Another confession: I came up with the title for this research project (“Performing Empowerment”) without ever having read Judith Butler. So, it was a happy accident to find The Judith Butler Reader (alongside a near-complete set of Tintins) in the bungalow I’m renting here in Batticaloa. So far, I have come away with two things from an initial and admittedly superficial reading of her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble. First, performativity partly arises from the lack of access to justice. Butler credits Derrida’s/Kafka’s “Before the Law” with inspiring her notion of performativity: “There the one who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits. … I wondered whether we do not labor under a similar expectation concerning gender … an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (94). Second, human rights claims (appeals for justice) can create new performances of gender. Butler describes how her early involvement in the lesbian and gay rights movement led her to “understand how the assertion of universality can be proleptic … conjuring a reality that does not yet exist … a future-oriented labor of cultural translation” (96).

VisAbility’s public performances of mixed-abled dance are meant to challenge the performativity of disability in Sri Lankan society. But in Jaffna, they also confronted the performativity of gender. Several disabled women were reluctant to take part for fear that performing in the street would bring shame on themselves and their families. Some asked to wear masks but such complete concealment contradicted VisAbility’s core mission. Happily, a compromise solution was reached whereby the dancers wore face paint and performed inside a public park. In subsequent interviews, we learned how disability and gender also intersected with political identities. A few of the disabled women were former combatants who had wanted to maintain a low profile in order to integrate into post-war society. We now need to explore whether they see their performance in the park as something of a “performative subversion” (93) of their disability, gender, and political identities.