Through the Communal Knowledge programme artist Patrick Staff will develop a range of choreographic strategies - including, but not exclusive to, group meetings and discussion, dance works, photography and video - to form an intersectional questioning of how bodies are presented, produced, represented and assessed in the fields of performance and dance; healthcare and therapy; technology; and labour.

The conversations, workshops and research engages questions of how neoliberalism imagines and composes embodied identities, and how systems may work to (re)produce naturalised constructions of an able-body. This research draws on queer and disability studies, seeking to question notions of a ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’* in its sites of production equally to its representation, and how ultimately it is embedded in complex economic, social and cultural relations.

*McRuer, R (2006). Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability*. New York and London: New York University Press.

In collaboration with Opening Doors London, Physical Study Group DreamArts and choreographer and performer Hamish MacPherson

With thanks to Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Kate Hancock, Jane Fowler, Antje Hildebrandt, Park Mcarthur, Vanda Playford, Romana Schmalisch and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.