Moving Outside the Therapeutic Frame: Discourse of Stability and Change in Creating Integrated Dance

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar I
  In Paper Session: Breaking the frame: Disability as embodied discourse of change

Abstract

Utilizing Dewey’ Art as Experience (1934), this essay explores how discourses of stability and change uphold the separation of people with disabilities from the world of art, especially dance. Through the efforts of the first American modern dance company to integrate professional stand-up and sit-down (wheelchair) dancers, The Dancing Wheels Company & School, located in Cleveland, OH, aims to avoid perceptions that individuals with disabilities participate in the arts solely for therapeutic outlets. Dance scholars have long applauded the therapeutic aspects of dance (Chaiklin, 1985; Halprin, 2000). However, Nash (2008) noted that artists with disabilities often have trouble moving outside the therapeutic frame to one of acceptance. In order to be accepted in the mainstream dance community, this company directs our attention to their abilities as professional artists through their aesthetic performances. Through their dialogic dance, Dancing Wheels hopes to raise consciousness about disability marginalization and discrimination. My ethnographic portrayal is based on my experiences as a participant observer, narratives performed in daily routines and collected through in-depth interviews with company members, staff and board members, and document analysis. I am interested in the ways the dancers perform a counter-narrative of disability which allows the company to (re)inscribe dance and (dis)ability by breaking away from a therapeutic understandings of art.

Author

• Margaret Quinlan, University of North Carolina at Charlotte