The succeeding pages hold a companion reader to the Extravagant Bodies symposium, including texts by both its participants and several colleagues who could not join us in Zagreb, but have decided to contribute to the discussion. What does it mean to show or be a different body on stage, on a city street, in bed with another? Can disability become an extravagance and difference alluring?

We open with Colin Barnes who examines an overview of a history of disability in western culture in a study referencing roots of prevailing prejudices and even repulsions, from ancient Greece and Rome, but also more recent social implications of the industrial age - the "oppression 8of persons with disability) founded upon the material and ideological changes which occured as a result of the emergence of capitalist society."

Andreja Bartolac offers a summary of her sociological study of experiences of Croatian men and women with cerebral palsy regarding their intimate life. How better then to follow up on her objective examination of society's misconceptions about the fulfillment of needs of persons with diasbility, but from the pen of someone who speaks out on his own behalf?

"They accuse us of being too direct and forthright. They say we are too candid. They are bothered when we hand out compliments." Andrej J. Jung  is explicity unapologetic towards a society that treats him as a person and sexual being "with prejudice and hostility, condescension and pity, ignorance and indifference". Still, he perseveres by raising the very questions that a many find unpleasant, questions that cause embarrassment and expose the reserve he faces daily as a disabled man.

Vojin Perić reflects in the most intimate manner on his personal 'view' of the world that surrounds him, one composed not of images, but of noise, murmurs, trembling and touch in a storyline that intersects a casual everyday run of errnad with memories of childhood, conversations with friends and a deeply sensual experience of a 'seeing' a woman walk by.

Speaking as a presenter and promoter of dance artists with disabilities, Jeremy Alliger writes of the potential of a physically integrated dance community. If "dancers are generally perceived as limitless" and persons with disability as limited, does the "bringing these two groups together redefine virtuosity"? Can we turn on its head the accepted notions of dance, performance and body image and engage in an exploration of new productions?

Lois Keidan, the co-founder and director of the Live Art Development Agency reflects on its support and development of Live Art practices, and discourses in London, the UK and internationally, recognizing Live Art as "a cutural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks. (...) Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating audiences, Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for."

Perceived in our society as "pathological, as tragic, as gifts from the gods, as signs of evil, as deviant, as burdens on the welfare state, as savants, or as mythological beings", disabled performers use the strategies of extravagance and embody the outsider to challenge social certainties. They employ the mythical and psychological energy of transgression and taboo as means that threaten to destroy the spiderweb of rational conventions. Petra Kuppers invokes Artaud's "tempting, seductive vision of a theater of ecstasy and empathy (...) widely explored in the happenings and performance art of the 1960s and 1970s" to examine several powerful artworks that undermin e traditional meanings of 'the political'.

Extravagant Bodies' A Film with Special Needs, a project lead by Mario Kovač, was envisioned as an artisitc and social experiment, a project bringing together people with different handicaps in a workshop endeavor in film making. A visually impaired camrea man, sound recording by hearing impaired members of the team, narration spoken by a deaf-mute person, "action" scenes performed by people with motor disabilities - what reactions will the making of the film provoke on the streets of Zagreb? Along with the premiere presentation of the film, Mario Kovač gives a lecture on methodology of working with the blind and visually impaired in the theatre.

With a twist on the topic, Jurij Krpan poses the question of how a non-disabled body can under certain circumstances become un-whole. Using cybernetic prostheses as artistic supplements, the work of Stelarc, Marcel.li Antunez Roca, Arthur Elenaar, Davide Gassi find the 'handicap' originally inscribed in the organism, one that can expand its limits only through a specialized interface.

 Juliet Robson is an artist who uses installation, live art, film and video to explore and deconstruct the idea of the "norm", how the boundaries of what is perceived as the norm are fluid within varying contexts. Often questioning her own assumptions through dialogue with her audiences, she focuses on artistic production and her role as a curator.

Bojana Kunst approaches the body with one example in particular, that of the enlightenment anatomists. "Modern man has successfully overcome the phantasmic miral classifications created in the 18th century, but only to substitute them for a world without secrets, bodies without organs, naked flesh, epidermal sacks, creation of doubles and clones, and genetic legitimation turned inside out."

Contemporary debates around issues of identity and representation cannot be elaborated without the acknowledgment of disability, of the extravagant body. The critical elements the following contributions highlight are all an integral part of examining the materiality of the body, its representation and society's stumble on the rouged terrain of disability. The implied step in the direction of addressing the relation of disability and politics, becomes a fundamental move for cultural and social change - regardless if those changes manifest themselves on the stage, in galleries, cinemas or in the streets.