Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren – författare

In a parlor game played by the Surrealist group—the foremost avant-gardists of their time—participants made their marks on the quadrants of a folded sheet of paper: a many-eyed head, a distorted torso, hands fondling swollen breasts, snarling reptilian-dog feet descending from an egg-shaped midsection. The "Exquisite Corpse," as it was called, is still very much alive, having found artistic and critical expression from the days of the Surrealists down to our own. This method has been used in collective artistic protocols as the "rules of engagement" for experimental art, as a form of social interaction, and as an alternative mode of critical thinking. This collection is the first to address both historical and contemporary works that employ the ritual of the cadavre exquis. It offers a unique overview of the efforts of scholars and artists to articulate new notions of crossing temporal and spatial boundaries and to experience in a new way the body's mutability through visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic frames. Bringing together diverse writers from across disciplinary boundaries, this volume continues the cultural and methodological innovations that have unfolded since the first days of the "Exquisite Corpse."

South Asian Disability and Deaf Theatres investigates translocal intimacies in relation to twenty-first-century transnational South Asian disability theatres in order to lay out new possibilities for accessible theatres.The book provides a theoretical and methodological framework for thinking through the relationships between disability, translocal intimacies, and visceral ethnography. It presents new and innovative approaches to rethinking bodily, cultural, spatial, and performance practices in relation to disability and disability rights that cut across national, sociocultural, and artistic boundaries. The author presents a consideration of some of India’s specific theatre examples such as Mahesh Dattani’s Tara; Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest; Shyambazar Blind Opera House’s Brihannala; Jana Sanskriti’s The Wasteland: A Journey; and First Drop Change Foundation’s Playback Theatre. Through analyses of specific performances and theatre groups and theoretical explorations of visceral ethnography, disability theatres’ decolonising initiatives, and disability as method, this book furthers the project of creating the conditions for a radically accessible and open-door theatre for both the present and the future.The first book to cover theatre and Disability Studies in India, it shows that disability literature and theatres assist in delineating ways of reworking the politics of intimacy and belonging within and across differences. The book makes an important contribution to the broad field of theatre, performance and Disability Studies as well as Feminist Studies and South Asian Studies.