Lisa Bufano

Lisa Bufano (October 20, 1972 – October 3, 2013)^[1] was a disabled American interdisciplinary performance artist whose work incorporated elements of doll-making, fabric work, animation, and dance.^[2]

Early life

Born Louise Bufano to Louis A. Bufano, Jr. and Elizabeth “Betty” Bufano in 1972 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, she was graduated from Tufts University in 2003,^[1] and later from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA).^[3] A competitive gymnast as a child^[4] (and a go-go dancer in college), she became a bilateral below-the-knee and total finger-thumb amputee due to a life-threatening staphylococcus bacterial infection at the age of 21.

Career

After losing her lower legs and almost the entirety of her fingers and thumbs, Bufano began her performance and dancing career when a professor at the University of Linz doing research on the lives of amputees discovered her web page and offered her a stipend to perform in Vienna.^[5] She toured (from 2006 to 2010) with the AXIS Dance Company,^[1] performing works variously choreographed by Victoria Marks, Joe Goode, and Kate Weare to audiences in Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Canada, and performed to a packed house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts^[6] in a program honoring fellow amputee and dancer Homer Avila^[7] (featured in Modern Dance Videos)^[8] as well as at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Judson Memorial Church in NYC, among other venues. ^{[citation needed]}

Her dance work typically incorporated a variety of prosthetics and props^[9][10] (such as using orange Queen Anne table legs as legs and arms),^[11] but also included segments where her unadorned body was the focus of the performance.^[12] According to Bufano she manipulated her body as a way to explore alternative locomotion (at 34 she ran several miles a day on high-tech carbon fiber prosthetic legs),^[13][14] corporeal difference, and animation/manipulation, interests which lead to many fruitful collaborations.^[15]

Bufano listed among her influences medical drawings, historical wax models and dolls, and optical toys; flip dolls and paper dolls; the structural aspects of Japanese jointed dolls, Hans Bellmer's doll work, Louise Bourgeois' cell installations, and the animation of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. One of her main projects was a white muslin dress which turned into a squid, for which she sewed thousands of detailed suckers. "She loved sewing sculptures made of fabric," her brother remarked in a remembrance. "She had a thing for the creepy-cute, the exotic, the bizarre. Things that were dark but also beautiful."^[16]

She explained her aesthetic and political goals when she claimed that:

Despite my own terror and discomfort in being watched (or, maybe, because of it), I am finding that being in front of viewers as a performer with deformity can produce a magnetic tension that could be developed into strength. I attempt to channel this tension by exaggerating the mode of physical difference (for example, presenting myself on stilts)."^[17]

She likewise explained during her time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

My eye has always been drawn to abnormal forms... It's just that now my tool is my body. I'm still animating a form, but it's my own form... I'm not an astounding dancer... But being a performer with a deformity, I find that there's a gut response in audiences, an attraction/repulsion aspect to it that can be compelling. I just hope that there's a balance between that gut response and the substance of a performance."^[18]

Originally based in Boston, Massachusetts, she has had an artist residency at the Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, and also in Boise, Idaho,^[19] after which she relocated to San Francisco, California in December 2012.^[20] She was a Franklin Furnace Fund recipient.

Death

Lisa Bufano committed suicide October 3, 2013 in San Francisco, alone at home with her dog; no suicide note was found.^[21]

References

External links

• Professional Home Page
• A short interview
• Five Open Mouths, her signature piece

Authority control WorldCat VIAF: 29348860 LCCN: no2008099952

Persondata
Name	Bufano, Lisa
Alternative names	Bufano, Louise (birthname)
Short description	American dancer and artist
Date of birth	1972
Place of birth	Bridgeport, Connecticut, U.S.
Date of death	2013
Place of death	San Francisco, California, U.S.