MOVING THROUGH THE DIFFERENCE: DANCE AND DESABILITY

Abstract

This article focuses on the notion of disability, questioning the ways in which professional dance has traditionally been structured by an exclusionary mindset that projects a vision of a dancer as white, female, thin, long-limbed, flexible and able-bodied. It also addresses the growing desire to radically revise this paradigm reenvisioning what kinds of movements can constitute a dance and, by extension, what kind of body can constitute a dancer. Although most of the discussion is centered in specific dances and in several critical responses to them, it is also proposed to reveal the complex ways in which the opposition of fit and frail bodies is implicated within many of the dominant cultural paradigms of health and self-determination.