The Potentia of Spastic Performativity: An artistic dialogue with choreographer and performer Tora Balslev, Daily Fiction

The cause of inequality rests in our minds and perception, and here it must be fought. In Daily Fictions’ dance performance SPLASTIC the dancers confront the concept of normality through body and movement. Gently they tear it apart, so everyone present must question what they until this point, physically took for granted. In SPLASTIC two women seek authenticity with each other as inspiration. One of the dancers is spastic. The other one feels captured in a physical normality, fast, determined and erect. Together they search for another
movement, a new normal, a physicality where they can feel at home. Spasticity is their tool and condition. By wrestling the concept of the normal, creating a liminal/fluid/shifting/transformational space of “becoming
norm(al), becoming Other” SPLASTIC enters into a contemporary gender debate of Queer and Crip Theory, which critically reflect on questions such as: What bodies are presented as ideal? Are some bodies disabled, or is it rather society that is “disabling”? For the conference, a 5-minute video extract of the performance will be shown, setting the stage for an artistic dialogue between choreographer and performer Tora Balslev and Charlotte Grum, a transdisciplinary artist working in the public domain. We want to reflect upon the embodied and potentializing effects of spastic performativity when enacted as a norm. At the same time, the turn-taking dialogue will give an insight into our shared practice of appreciative enquiry as a valuable artistic research method.