Dance and Disability
Art, Medicine, Agent of Change
Upon landing in Siberia after a thirty-six hour flight, American dancers Bonnie Lewkowicz and Judith Smith were separated from their group, their interpreter, and their passports. With no explanation, they were taken into a room with a “big Russian nurse” for examination.
Why? The pair explain that visible disability is often equated to being unhealthy, and Lewkowicz and Smith both have disabilities that require them to use wheelchairs — which they were also separated from. After the examination, they were “tossed” on a plane, and after a confused thirty minutes of waiting alone and without information they were reunited with the rest of their group.
On another occasion, the two artists were flying from San Jose to Boston to perform with AXIS Dance Company, a contemporary dance company they co-founded that specializes in performance work with dancers of all abilities, when a flight attendant asked them if they were “going to a conference or something.”
“No,” they said, “We’re dancers! We’re going to a performance.”
The flight attendant started laughing hysterically. “No, no, no! Really — what are you doing?”
“We’re a dance company,” they reaffirmed.
Lewkowicz and Smith shared these stories and others like them on an episode of the Disability Visibility Project’s podcast in 2014. They discussed the challenges of traveling internationally, the lack of accessibility at performance venues, their interaction with audiences, and more.
They describe questioning the motivations of audiences who give standing ovations: are they putting performers on pedestals because of their disabilities, or are they appreciating genuinely good art? After a few years of performing, Lewkowicz and Smith came to realize it was the latter.
Audiences who attend physically integrated dance performances aside, what are the general perceptions of disability and dance? It is by no means rare that people make false assumptions about others’ careers and lifestyles based on the way they look. Lewkowicz and Smith’s incident with the flight attendant in San Jose is just the tip of the iceberg.
To the general public, what does a dancer look like? And how does the perception of a “normal” dancer shift as people are increasingly exposed to artists with different bodies in dance and performance contexts? Some common mental images might be a slender ballerina en pointe, a break dancer executing gravity-defying moves, or fast-footed swing dancers with limbs a-blur. Dance, specifically the word “dancer,” tends to conjure up ideas of a person who is dedicated to reaching intense levels of physical ability. They are likely competitive and conventionally attractive. The dancer prides themself in their physical skills and feats of aesthetic athleticism. Yet, when we consider the reality of who is actually dancing, these rigid assumptions quickly dissolve.
Laura Dajao is a UK-based dance artist and wheelchair user. She has trained and performed with multiple dance companies in the UK, and is forging her own style of dance that melds hip hop, contemporary, and other styles. When asked what a dancer looks like in a short film with the organization People Dancing, she replied:
“When you feel movement and communicate something through dance — that’s what makes you a dancer; technique and style come later.”
Another element of dance that many take for granted is music: there are assumptions that there must be music, that the music is the driving force that a dancer follows, that a dancer can hear the music.
Antoine Hunter is a Deaf/hard of hearing choreographer, dancer, dance instructor, actor and advocate. A Bay Area native, Hunter attended Skyline High School and was one of the few Deaf students in the school. In a recent piece with the Oaklandside, Hunter reflected on his high school experience and his introduction to dance.
Hunter had dreams of playing sports at his high school, but there was no precedent for a deaf student playing sports there. Hunter had to give up on his dream. Trying to communicate with his fellow classmates was also a struggle: “I’ve always been poetic with words,” he says. “But if I told someone to ‘move like a mango,’ they would just say, ‘Hey, why are you talking like that?’” His difficulties communicating with his peers affected him so intensely that he contemplated taking his own life.
Then, he took a dance class. The class assignment was to collaborate in groups, but Hunter was an outcast. He decided to do his first solo choreography piece. He couldn’t really hear the words, so he physically performed the coldness and loneliness he felt. “During the song’s powerful instrumental break, however, Hunter was suddenly all over the room, his body channeling the lightning, wind, and ocean he says he sensed in the music, as well as his own pain” (The Oaklandside, para. 7).
For the first time, his classmates understood what he was trying to communicate: “They told me, ‘I really felt you were cold, alone, and suffering.’ That was when I realized that through dance I could communicate, and that saved my life.”
Hunter serves as an activist and advocate for the Deaf and Black Deaf communities. He founded an inclusive dance school, the Urban Jazz Dance Company, where accessibility is a top priority. There are wheelchair ramps, interpreters and aids, and a device that sends vibrations through the floor when music plays.
Hunter performs extensively. When he performs with live musicians, he watches their movements and records the rhythms in his own body memory. In an interview with Microsoft Design (linked below), he says “I really want to know the music they’re doing. But I’m fine, I’m satisfied because I’ve made mine. I have my voice, I have my music, and I’m with them. And it only happens without my hearing aid, I was able to listen to myself more. Wow! I started hearing my body more… I wish I could tell people to take a minute to listen to yourself.”
In the beginning of AXIS Dance Company’s existence, outsiders would say that what AXIS was doing was therapy. While dance company leaders and instructors would resist the formal title of therapist, there is certainly an aspect of healing that occurs when people tune into their bodies and express their feelings to others. Dance combines the relief that comes from artistic expression and the healing properties of mental focus and creative physical movement — however subtle that movement may be. Dancers’ motivation to dance isn’t always to experience healing, but it is often a welcome byproduct.
Alternatively, some people are explicitly drawn to dance for its healing properties: study after study show that dance is good medicine. And beyond the peer-reviewed scientific evidence, the simple fact that cultures around the world have been dancing together throughout human history is its own form of evidence.
India Harville is a disabled/chronically ill somatic bodyworker, dancer, instructor, activist, and educator. In January of 2020, India was a guest on an episode of the Disability Visibility Podcast. In the episode, she and host Alice Wong discuss what healing through dance and accessible dance spaces look like in practice. Their conversation is rich with ideas and strategy for creating access, so rather than paraphrase and skim over a conversation that is really the core of this topic, I’ve decided to copy much of it here. (Here is a link to the full transcript.)
India explains some of the practical elements of working with dancers with varying abilities, including herself:
India Harville (IH): …many different kinds of disabled folks show up in my classes, and we’re looking for what we can do to be together and create movement. And so, sometimes it means I’m looking for what are the common things that we can do as a group to give us a unifying place to enter our movement from.
I’ve had classes where some people were having a really hard time with a lot of large movements in their body, and maybe some people didn’t have capacity for large movements. And so, we could create a dance that was about just turning our heads and blinking. So, really finding what are our common elements, and then allowing the genius of using those things to come alive in the space.
And then, on the performance side for myself, and this is still tricky, how to build performances in which I don’t know what I’ll be able to do on a given day because I have a disability where my capacity varies really vastly. And so, designing very open and spacious kinds of choreography or kinds of scores or just the pattern of what’s going to happen so that I could do it if I were standing or if I were in a wheelchair or scooter or if I might even need to lie down.
That’s a really different way than choreography is usually created. Another thing I like about that is it means that you can interchange any number of dancers into those spaces. If you’ve created an idea about what the choreography is going to express, that can be expressed by a variety of different bodies. And so, that feels really exciting to me.
India has extensive experience in fields of embodiment like massage, somatics, and of course, dance. But dance has a special role:
IH: I think when I’m dancing, I feel the most free… and I feel like… nothing can be going on in my life that I can’t bring to dance and have some sort of alchemical shift occur where I come out with a different understanding of what I came in with. And that happens very in my bones and in my actual physicality.
India often brings this healing perspective to her dance classes by using principles from somatic bodywork.
IH: “Soma’s” just a fancy word for “the body.” And I offer a lot of body-based practices and massage and different ways of touching the body when folks are OK with touch that are designed to help people deepen their connection with their own body. And that can be ways of touching someone to help them become more aware of their breath, or it can be touching someone and helping loosen the muscles so that they can feel what it feels like to have less tension in their body.
It’s a wide range of kinds of tools that just help people feel more comfortable inside of their body. And working with people for whom comfort in the body is a very slippery slope! It’s not always that easy.
ALICE WONG: Yeah. And I think this speaks to the medical-industrial complex and like ableism and capitalism that so many of us are completely kind of alienated from our bodies or that we’re taught to be, you know, to kind of have a very difficult relationship with our bodies. So, how does your understanding of bodies tie in with performing and dancing? Because clearly, your work as a bodyworker must feed into that, and it goes back and forth as an artist.
IH: I think one thing that’s really important for me in my work, whether that’s making art or doing [unclear] or dance is helping people understand that everything their body does is OK. And every way they show up enriches the space and is acceptable. And I think what I love about dance as a way to help people feel that is that it’s not just an intellectual conversation or thinking about it.
I remember a very pivotal moment for me in a dance training where I was a student, and I would have moments where I would have seizures and/or paralysis, and I’d be unable to move. And people in the space were learning how to be with me at those times. And I had been in so many dance places where that was considered a problem, and I needed to be ushered away and hidden somewhere. And this was the first time where it was considered just what was, and it was considered beautiful and part of the choreography and something to be with. And that was such a healing moment for me because that wasn’t something I was even always able to do for myself. And I still struggle with it sometimes. But to have that experience be something that happened at a cellular level that my body felt was really different than intellectually talking about it. And I think that that’s one of the medicines for me of dance.
And I think that’s even true to me at the level of social justice. So, there’s a lot of times where we have these intellectual frameworks and we have these ideals of what we want to be living into, but we’re not as skilled at embodying them and being them with each other. And I think there’s something about the practice of dance that is great training ground for living our principles and, in real time, doing the things that we’ve been thinking about with our bodies, with each other, to kind of let that sink in to a deeper depth. And I think that that’s some of the ways I see the tie between healing and dance and the arts.
Seeing how dance is beneficial for so many individuals, and even a viable career, it is important to look at what might prohibit young people from becoming involved. The British Journal of Special Education and the University of Bedfordshire published a paper titled “Barriers to dance training for young people with disabilities” in 2013. The authors, Imogen Aujla and Emma Redding, did a thorough literature review in an attempt to learn more about the barriers young people with disabilities encounter on the journey to becoming professional dancers. The paper includes their findings, as well as some strategies that would minimize these barriers and open up more access. The recommendations were somewhat specific to the UK, but the general ideas are applicable to other regions as well.
The authors found a few key hurdles for aspiring dancers, including aesthetic, attitudinal, and logistical barriers.
First, and one we’ve touched on already, is the aesthetic barrier: what does a dancer look like? The dance industry is overly focused on physical and aesthetic factors as opposed to artistic and movement qualities.
As Ann Cooper Albright notes in the book Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance:
Professional dance has traditionally been structured by an exclusionist mind‐set that projects a very narrow vision of a dancer as white, female, thin, long‐limbed, flexible, able bodied … the prevailing image of professional dance equates physical ability with aesthetic quality.
The dance industry’s aesthetic exclusionism, especially during auditions, is a reality young dancers are highly aware of. They may struggle to reconcile this barrier with their goals, concluding that they aren’t a good fit to pursue dance if they do not resemble the norm.
The second barrier, attitudinal, can sometimes come from within the minds of aspiring dancers themselves. But attitudinal barriers are more likely to come from parents and guardians, peers, carers, teachers (including dance teachers), critics, and general cultural messaging. The attitude that performing arts aren’t suitable for people with disabilities is a prevalent one, and this belief is largely due to a lack of understanding and awareness of the disability arts scene.
Parents and teachers may try to protect the aspiring dancer from potential disappointment by talking them out of the activities they see as poor fits. Because dance is perceived as a necessarily physically demanding discipline, it is typically not considered a suitable activity for people with disabilities. But, as we have seen, this is simply not true.
The third barrier has to do with training and logistics. Regarding training, there is a lack of regular classes focused on progression — working toward accreditation and vocational training — for dancers with disabilities. There is also a lack of teachers who have knowledge about training students with special needs. Where there are accessible dance resources, they are usually recreational rather than educational; they focus on therapy or fun instead of the rigorous development of technique and artfulness that aspiring dancers want and need.
Beyond training, there are still logistical barriers like transportation and physical access to buildings. Many theaters are now accessible for audience members who use wheelchairs, yet the stage and backstage areas too often remain inaccessible.
In addition to physical access, dancers with disabilities tend to need a greater length of time to train, and this has obvious financial implications.
The most powerful recommendation Aujila and Redding make for overcoming these barriers is to build an effective network between schools, dance studios, youth dance groups, and professional integrated dance companies. These networks help information that might otherwise be silenced or ignored spread to interested students and encourage participation with dance at a range of levels. With a strong network of schools, studios, and professional dance companies, young people will be supported throughout their journey in dance.
AXIS is a great example of an access-centered dance company imbedded in a supportive network. From the “Engagement” page of their website:
AXIS’ outreach program began in 1989 in direct response to community demand by those who saw our performances and wanted to study this new form of dance. AXIS maintains a more extensive engagement program than any other integrated dance program in the United States or abroad. Our programming offers opportunities and events for all ages and abilities, and we are a primary pre-professional training ground for aspiring dancers with disabilities.
The company and the assemblies focus on dance: modeling people with and without disabilities dancing, and dancing together.
AXIS offers free events for school children of all ages, in which they demonstrate the choreography of their physically integrated dance company. They also have educational performance programs for families, showcasing the artistic work the company does, and includes the audience in a “dance experience.” AXIS annually connects with local schools, over 20 in the Bay Area, to have candid discussions with students.
Crucially, AXIS’s Choreo-Lab provides disabled choreographers with access to mentorship and opportunities for career advancement. They have teacher trainings, community classes, and workshops. For dancers of all abilities who want to develop their technique and collaborate with others, AXIS offers a summer intensive program that draws participants from around the world.
Dancers (left to right): DeMarco Sleeper, Lani Dickinson, Yuko Monden Juma, AJ Guevara, JanpiStar.
AXIS’s work is just one example of how a dance company can minimize the barriers that commonly inhibit dancers with disabilities from pursuing their goals. The company represents a wide variety of body types, backgrounds, and abilities, which help minimize the aesthetic and attitudinal barriers into the dance industry. Community involvement, candid discussions with the public, and lots of opportunities for serious training further shrink the attitudinal barrier.
AXIS is also trying to shrink the logistical barrier, which requires a high level of engagement and activism with larger societal systems. In 2017, they published a report called The Future of Physically Integrated Dance in the USA.
From AXIS’ advocacy page:
The report looked at ways to: 1) improve and expand training opportunities and develop pedagogy for dancers with disabilities; and 2) improve training and expand opportunities for disabled choreographers and non-disabled choreographers to work with disabled dancers or integrated ensembles.
We’ve discussed the perspective of dancers, instructors, and dance companies, but we’ve only briefly touched on the audience. While dancing alone can be a fun and fulfilling experience, many performers are artists who desire for their work to be witnessed by others, perhaps to spread an idea or message. Or, like Antoine Hunter, to simply communicate where words fail.
In a piece titled “AXIS Dance Company: The Anxiety and the Afterglow,” dancer and critic Doran George reviewed “Room with No View,” “Vessel,” and “Point to Something,” dance pieces that the AXIS dance company performed in Los Angles in 2010.
It begins:
When I invited a friend to the performance by AXIS dance company, an “ensemble of performers with and without disabilities”, it was shocking when she confessed to being too sensitive to watch people “who’d suffered such misfortune.” Naively, perhaps, I’d assumed there would be general consensus that this was one of the more conventionally beautiful pieces of dance to be performed in Los Angeles this year.
Before moving on, we should address this important point: the people who attend performances that center dancers with disabilities are not a representative sample of the general public — not even of the wider dance-appreciating public. The fact that George’s friend declined to witness artists who had bodies she deemed as victims of misfortune shows that society still has a long way to go in terms of education, inclusivity, and general empathy.
The review then turns to the performance itself:
The percussive section, which had felt like common ground before, now seemed like choreography that was limited, in service of integration, by what the wheelchair users couldn’t do. This led to a reading of the piece in which those who were “fully abled” were placed in comparison to those who were “dis-abled,” and the former were found to excel. Entering the modern dance stage, as it has in the latter part of the twentieth century, the “disabled subject” is too easily viewed as imitating its able-bodied counterpart in work that recapitulates traditions of virtuosity.
AXIS artistic director Judith Smith suggests that after multiple viewings of the company’s performances, however, “ability” is what audiences see rather than disability. This suggests that other readings of the choreography are possible and that the wheelchair users are contributing to the vocabulary of movement in a way that would leave the dances sorely impoverished if they were not there.
At first, George experiences the performance in a way that follows the typical script: fully-abled dancers excel while disabled dancers imitate what they can. The binary remains intact.
However, George ends the piece by describing the exact shift in perspective that Smith suggested may happen after viewing these performances. It is ability, not disability, that stands out:
In Alex Ketley’s “Vessel,” wheelchairs are directed at times by users Sheppard and Bell with a transparent discernment of the relationship between tire traction and weight, such that elegant shifts in their body/machinery support spins and lifts in the bodies of Das and Giles. Similarly, in Delwaide’s “Room,” Das and Giles deftly counterweight Sheppard and Bell and their chairs, at times creating moving acts of balance. Such moments of mutual interdependence between dancers who do and do not use wheelchairs complicate the terms “able-bodied” and “disabled,” for they produce a collaborative body which neither subject can achieve in isolation. Dance might be understood here as creating a new bodily ideal, even a new identity, based in a hybridization — or at the very least destabilization of — the previously bifurcated terms. Moreover, there are myriad moments, too many to mention here, throughout the repertory of AXIS that upset, reverse, or otherwise disturb the binaries between the “abled” and “dis-abled” subject.
Doran George’s perception of “disturbed binaries” is exactly what former AXIS artistic director Judith Smith suggested would happen after multiple viewings of the company’s performances.
Why might this shift in perception occur? Eimir McGrath (University of Bedfordshire) wrote a thesis paper titled “Beyond integration: reformulating physical disability in dance” which examines the placement of disabled bodies in dance performance from the intersecting perspectives of Critical Disability Studies, Performance Studies, and Interpersonal Neurobiology.
McGrath writes about the shift in perspective that comes with seeing people with disabilities and different bodies in a performance setting:
Dance that includes corporealities that are not perceived as ‘normal’ provides opportunity for a reparative experience for those who react to disability with the primitive, reflexive responses that reinforce negative perceptions.
In a performance setting, there is time and space to create a more adaptive, empathic response that will literally rewire the brain to initiate a more positive reaction. Through repeated experiences of viewing performance, the primitive reflexive responses become redundant as implicit permission to stare creates new neuronal pathways based on curiosity.
The innate human desire to relate then activates empathic attunement where the performer’s embodied presence resonates with the viewer’s own embodiment thus providing the potential for changed perceptions.
The context of a dance performance gives all in attendance the explicit permission to stare. People who reflexively respond to visible disability with discomfort or fear might use this venue to witness others more deeply than is habitual for them. When the fearful first glances have been exhausted and there is still an hour left in the show, there isn’t much for the mind to do but allow curiosity to emerge. Since George’s friend never took the leap to attend the performance, she was not able to experience the process of turning the primitive negative response into curiosity and humanization.
A stage, a powerful site that grants permission to stare and relate to the performers, can rewire minds and dissolve biases.
Another viewer of an AXIS performance describes a show in San Francisco in a paper titled “Mobility: AXIS Dancers Push the Boundaries of Access.” Many attendees were wheelchair users, and the author describes feeling that disability was no longer “in its usual marginalized spaces along the fringes of the auditorium.” Instead, wheelchair users were on stage, in the front rows, and in the aisles, “challenging” the ratio of people with disabilities to those without. The audience enforced the agency of the dancers on stage.
The author, who was able-bodied, reflects: “I was, in effect, looking through impairment at disability.” In this moment the author understood that their perspective was limited: they had not experienced life being forced into the margins.
“I needed to rethink both my definition of dancing bodies and my assumptions about disability access to stage auditoriums,” the author notes.
In conclusion, dance is often assumed to be an activity and art form that people who have disabilities cannot participate in. This is a false assumption: there is a lively and rigorous scene for dancers of all abilities to grow and develop their practice in, and there exists support for those who are interested. The dance industry is, in general, overly focused on the aesthetics of dancers’ bodies, but there are activists, advocates, and dance companies who are working to erase this barrier.
Dance is an art form and a healing practice. In a culture that tends to compromise our relationships with our bodies — especially marginalized bodies — dance can be a tool to heal that connection and strengthen it further. For some, dance is a mode of communication and expression that is more effective than words. It allows artists, performers, choreographers, and even recreational dancers the opportunity to move their bodies in a way that transcends words, promotes well-being, fosters community, representation, personal expression, and shifts perspectives.