The Wheelchair in Contact Improvisation
Encounters with the Dance Company ANQA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22456/1982-8918.147622Keywords:
Disability, Dance, Bodies, ObjectsAbstract
Contact Improvisation (CI) is a choreographic form that emerged in the USA in the 1970s in a context of interdisciplinary artistic collaboration and the vindication of social rights, including those of groups of people with disabilities. The sensitive body is established in CI as a paradigm not only of a pedagogy of the senses but also of an accessible pedagogy and a queer phenomenology, based on diversity and reciprocity. Within this framework, I highlight the dinamics observed in annual stays with the ANQA dance company since 2014 and in interviews with Isabelle Brunaud, choreographer, and Marie Laure Kaminski, dancer. The wheelchair constitutes in the evolution of ANQA and the CI an object that exposes the complexity and difficulties of relationships in artistic and everyday contexts and, at the same time, symbolises the unimaginable possibilities of encounters in creative processes.
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