l-e-a-k-y

This project is supported by a Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Residency with previous support from an Access. Movement. Play. (A.M.P.) Residency (2024) — supported The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

L-e-a-k-y is a radical access-as-performance dance work created for ONE disabled audience member. Created with a collective of multi-disabled dancers (Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban, India Harville, and Cory Nakasue) and led by Elisabeth Motley, L-e-a-k-y troubles conventional product-oriented performance and instead prioritizes the small, slow interdependence that disability culture-building requires. The performance event includes access needs for one: airfare/travel to the performance event, accessible lodging, COVID protocols, and meals, amongst other yet-to-be-imagined care practices.

Photography by Whitney Browne

Using community dance practices, score work, and crip choreographic methods, L-e-a-k-y yields non-traditional or alternative documentation of the performance, such as images, image descriptions, and ASL of the audience members’ access needs, access ephemera, and institutional access audits, all of which constitute a counter-performance. L-e-a-k-y unsettles the logics of market capitalism with which performance production is so entwined. It presses at the boundaries of notions of universal access to create specific access and care-full performance.

Connecting across accessibility borders is essential to move beyond compulsory norms and create a more socially just future. Disabled dancers are often kept apart from one another through various barriers that impede disabled wisdom. Leaky investigates the specifics of what is required to join our disabled energies. The project asks not only what we need but also what we desire in order to come together. Leaky envisions new practices for the primacy of disabled voices to come together on their own terms.