About this Event
“Boy Falls From the Sky: Disability as Spectacle in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" examines Julie Taymor’s blockbuster musical, which cost an eye-popping $75 million–the most expensive Broadway production in history. While the musical by Taymor and U2 musicians Bono and The Edge promised a theatrical “post-biological era” of flying bodies and superhero kinetics, the production's dramaturgy was steeped in eugenic longing for designer genes, perfected anatomies, and a future purged of human fragility. Bringing together critical disability studies, performance theory, and musical theatre history, Yates traces how Turn Off The Dark mobilizes pseudo-scientific language and spectacular stage technologies to naturalize fantasies of bodily optimization in the twenty-first century.
Despite all attempts to humanize the superhero, Taymor’s production ultimately casts disability as a threat we must overcome, write out, or spectacularly transcend. Yet, even as the musical pursues hypercapacity across its narrative, the production itself produced disability during rehearsals and performances. The intricate aerial systems malfunctioned, causing serious injury to actors and prompting government Health and Safety investigations–revealing how the commercial theatre industry's reliance on the “able” triple-threat performer is itself an unstable fiction. Ultimately, Yates interrogates this paradox: a musical obsessed with escaping the bodily limitations of the human condition simultaneously disabled the very performers charged with enacting its fantasy. “Boy Falls From the Sky” reframes Turn Off the Dark not as an infamous Broadway flop but as a case study for how we imagine, discipline, and exploit the body in commercial theatre. What becomes visible when a superhero story collapses under the weight of its own eugenic aspirations?
Dr Samuel Yates is a deaf dramaturg-scholar who is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Pennsylvania State University. Their research on disability aesthetics and accessibility practices in the performing arts asks how our notions of disability and the able body inform and transform theatrical performance. Samuel’s research on disability and performance has been published in JDTC, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Theatre Survey, as well as edited volumes such as The Matter of Disability (U Michigan), A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury), and Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Social Disqualification (Routledge). As a dramaturg and disability access consultant, they have collaborated with theaters such as the Abbey Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, Great Plains Theatre Commons, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, The Samuel Beckett Centre, and Gala Hispanic Theatre. Their first book, Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in Musical Theatre, is under contract with University of Michigan Press, and their co-edited textbook, Teaching Writing Across Theatre and Performance Studies: A Resource Guide, is forthcoming from Palgrave.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 62-64 Eton Avenue, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
