ABSTRACT
Despite a wealth of literature about dementia in various areas, the examination of dementia as it appears in contemporary theatre performance is underdeveloped. In this chapter, the author aims to consider this gap, introduce several emerging trends in this area, and demonstrate that the narrativisation of dementia tends towards a demarcation of the person with dementia from other subjects in the work. She argues that positioning dementia adjacent to current disability studies and describes how the medical narrative of dementia has driven the stigma against people with dementia. The author demonstrates how the current focus on dementia and the arts is rooted in therapy. She provides an overview of the current landscape of dementia in contemporary performance and centre on how the demarcation between people with dementia and people without manifests in several performances. While demarcation occurs in most performances of dementia, staged in various ways, works that more successfully reframe dementia do exist.
