Choreographic Practices - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

In this article I discuss the creative experiences of dance artists with disabilities and their relationship to an economy of social inclusiveness that animates the neo-liberal tendencies of democratic Brazil. I discuss dance performances that involve people with disabilities in the context of Brazil’s artistic communities and social policies. I begin with my experience as a dancer and director of Roda Viva Cia de Dança and then review other contemporary artists with disabilities from Brazil, such as Marcos Abranches, in order to reimagine not only the social but also the artistic implications that disability might have for dance in Brazil. My goal is to move ideologically beyond the inclusive model that allows everyone to dance and emphasize the ­importance of artistic voice and creative autonomy.

This article considers the display of the disabled body in dance performance. I use Heidi Latsky’s Five Open Mouths as an example of how staging physical otherness can be an act of provocation that reframes conventional perceptions of the disabled dancing body. I draw on cultural critic Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s construct of the ‘baroque stare’ as a prolonged and engaged visual encounter between seer and seen. Used productively in dance, this stare helps viewers recognize how they experience seeing and holds potential as a generative site for renegotiating social, cultural and aesthetic assumptions about the disabled body.

This article speaks about transmission and disability culture, and about a dance created by a disabled person, German choreographer Raimund Hoghe, in order to excavate something lost: disability culture’s history, disabled people’s sense of a particular history that pertains to them and that puts their unique embodiment and enmindment into a wider temporal perspective. Waltzing and turning are dancerly metaphors throughout this article, ways in which language and movement join in dance work about that which has vanished.

This article brings together two different perspectives, dance and law, to ask questions about authorship and ownership in disabled dance. The focus is on Caroline Bowditch’s short film project, A Casting Exploration, in which she is recast as the female dancer in a duet section from Joan Cleville’s choreography for Scottish Dance Theatre, Love Games. We explore what medical law, human rights law and intellectual property law might say about Bowditch’s role. We show how the film project raises questions about the aesthetic properties of the double duet, the politics of sameness and difference, and who can claim ‘ownership’ of the dance.

From 2008 to 2012, I worked as a dramaturge in Japan and Germany, developing an international dance project titled Thikwa plus Junkan Project with Osamu Jareo, a choreographer based in Japan. This project, involving Japanese and German differently abled performers, was created and performed in both countries. This article highlights our experiences while designing and implementing this mixed-ability, intercultural project. Stretching across disciplines and code systems, this project reveals cultural construction of dis/ability and dance aesthetics and provides an alternative concept for dancing bodies. To avoid using the other culture for one’s own benefit as well as to avoid being consumed as its others in the international dance market, I consider, in this article, how the intercultural dramaturgy of this project aims to realize a cultural ecology of dance by switching our cultural frames to balance the power.

Why is the inclusion of the disabled significant for Dance? How do the different ways in which dance by people with disabilities and older dancers aid one’s understanding of Othering? This article extends my earlier discussion offered in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011a, 2011b and 2012 that these largely marginalized groups suffer similar fate of invisibility within concert/theatre dance in South Africa. Gayatri Spivak’s provocation of the voiceless and Sylvia Glasser’s politics of dance foreground my argument of diverse dancing bodies. Dance, like multiple Englishes, opens up avenues of tolerance and grace for all South Africans. Recent choreographic examples such as Ina Wichterich-Mogane’s Lovaffair and Ananda Fuchs’s Fragile Falling reflect a continuum of disgraceful dancing bodies, marked on the periphery that could be seen as an aesthetic and ethical necessity in postcolonial spaces. These inclusions could constitute new pathways to valuing the lived and performative experiences of such diverse bodies.

In this article the authors scrutinize their own experiences of dance improvisation with differently bodied dancers and seek to connect this experience to embodied transformative learning. As dance teachers and teacher educators they are concerned that the possibilities and values embedded in embodied learning are only minimally understood in schools and teacher education in Norway, where they work. Embodied transformative learning enables students and teachers to experience new sensations and understandings of themselves as individuals and as members of a community. They can gain insight into the capabilities of others and understand the potential for different and unique students to become dancers and choreographers. These discoveries made in dance improvisation connect to critical and transformative pedagogy as well as to politics.