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Although the performing arts are often framed as spaces of experimentation and bodily freedom where norms can be challenged, training in the performing arts continues to be structured around implicit models of corporeality, normative pedagogical practices and technical standards that presuppose a substantial uniformity of bodies. This paper interrogates artistic training as a key site where a first selection of bodies occurs, shaping which corporealities gain access to professional artistic pathways. This process affects both the presence—or absence—of certain bodies on the contemporary stage and the forms of embodied representation that the performing arts system makes imaginable.
In the Italian context — within which this research is currently situated — schools and academies of theatre and dance, like many performance venues, first present problems of architectural inaccessibility. In cases where this first obstacle can be overcome, other barriers of a pedagogical nature quickly emerge. Training techniques, curricula and teaching models continue to be built around a form of compulsory able-bodiedness that implicitly works to redraw the boundaries of who can participate in artistic training. Even if such barriers were to be surpassed, a third dimension of exclusion would still remain, operating on a cultural level: both the educational system and the professional field of the performing arts rarely make space for such bodies. As a consequence, this produces an absence of models, references and political imaginaries. As a result, many people with disabilities are unable to access institutional artistic training, turning instead to demanding informal pathways or abandoning professional training altogether. Paradoxically, performative practices often become accessible mainly through inclusive contexts and forms of so-called social theatre. While this research does not seek to demonize these experiences, it highlights how they rarely lead to professional artistic pathways and instead function as channels of access that seldom challenge this structural configuration. The result is an extremely limited presence of disabled artists. This system feeds a vicious circle: the limited number of artists with disabilities produces a reduced presence of these corporealities on stage; reduced visibility generates few models and forms of representation; and the absence of such models makes it harder for many disabled people in the audience to imagine their own bodies in those spaces. In this way, the system tends to produce a continuous self-reproduction of absence.
Building on these considerations, the paper examines artistic training as a central mechanism through which the absence of disabled bodies in the performing arts is produced, drawing on an initial mapping of training pathways in theatre and dance academies in Italy. Situating itself at the intersection of performance, disability, queer, and crip studies, the research also explores how certain contemporary artistic practices challenge this configuration by experimenting with alternative modes of transmitting and training the performative body. From this perspective, experiences developed by choreographer and performer Chiara Bersani suggest the emergence of an embodied crip pedagogy, capable of redefining access to training and performance through the use of disability as method.