Prompt: A Journal of Theatre Theory, Practice, and Teaching, Issue 1.2

“When a point goes for a walk”:  Accessible Design and the World of the Play

Charlene Gross’s video, Seeing Elements of Design for Prompt

This essay responds to Charlene Gross’s teaching video Seeing Elements of Design, in which she illustrates the fundamental building blocks of design through the simplicity of an orange. Extending her provocation that design begins “when a point goes for a walk,” I ask what happens when that point does not walk but instead wheels, crutches, crawls, or signs its way through space. Drawing on Elinor Fuchs’s conception of the play as a “small planet” and Lisa Duggan’s articulation of “cripistemology,” I argue that accessible design requires us to decenter the able body as the default inhabitant of theatrical worlds. Using American Sign Language as an example of how shape, line, and movement generate meaning through embodied form, I suggest that to design cripistemologically is to reimagine the base elements of design as tools for access, survival, and joy. Ultimately, the essay proposes that design is not only aesthetic but epistemic: it conveys who is expected to belong, what kinds of bodies are anticipated, and how we imagine the “world of the play” as a space of possibility.

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Inversions: Three Approaches to Collaborating Through Theatrical Models

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Choreographing conjoinment: Side Show’s fleshly fixations and disability simulation