ABSTRACT
This chapter reframes learning disability as an aesthetic potential, rather than a pervasive social burden or injury. It examines a single live performance and demonstrates that theatre has the potential to radically undermine normative misperceptions of learning disabled persons. Meet Fred by Hijinx Theatre, based in Cardiff, Wales, was made in collaboration with puppet company, Blind Summit, and is an apt example of the opportunities that are generated by a close reading of a live artwork. Blind Summit use such puppets as training tools in their style of Bunraku, a fact amplified at a late point in the show when Fred is revealed to be one of a dozen puppets in a box: not even a “real” puppet but a preparation for one. The play achieves its effects by continually undoing the proper play: the story of Fred’s journey through the world. This is the first principle of the poetics of vulnerability: that vulnerability is an interruptive value.
