Abstract
AllPlay Dance is founded on a collaborative approach to research between the School of Psychology and the School of Communication of Creative Arts, both of Deakin University. The research is also undertaken in partnership with professional ballet company, Queensland Ballet. This paper describes the development and execution of two pilot projects for children with disability, utilizing a dance studies methodology. The projects were conducted in 2018 and 2019 for children with cerebral palsy (CP) and autism spectrum disorder, as part of the AllPlay Dance program. Participants with disabilities ranged in age from 7 to 12 years. As well as describing the approach to the program development, we discuss the involvement of older and more experienced buddies who were included as a method to support the participation in dance of children with disabilities. We will also describe the diffusion of authorship in the making of group dances as a tool for inclusion and the premise of dance as a social practice in which participants inter-subjectively generate meaning and sense making. The AllPlay Dance projects were developed as a series of dance classes in which participants worked with set or learned movement material, dance improvisation, and tasks for movement generation in order to collectively generate a dance for performance. This paper focuses on the aim of developing inclusive approaches to dance classes that challenge “ableist” notions of dance as spectacle to enable to work toward building transferable programs to allow all children who so desire and to participate in dance in their communities.
Highlights
This paper discusses the development of two pilot dance projects for children with disabilities initiated as part of the AllPlay program of Deakin University
We employed a methodology which draws on a dance studies approach whereby the practices of dance, that is the teaching, creating, and analysis of dance material and dances are the site of the research
We describe the development of the dance class material and methods, the diffusion of authorship, and, in particular, the use of “buddies”; older and more experienced dancers, as methods of inclusion
Summary
This paper discusses the development of two pilot dance projects for children with disabilities initiated as part of the AllPlay program of Deakin University (allplay.org.au). AllPlay has the broad aim of creating new pathways for inclusion for children with disabilities to participate in activities in the community. We aimed to develop inclusive strategies to better support the participation in dance for children with two specific disabilities AllPlay Dance. – cerebral palsy (CP; 2018 project) and autism (2019 project). We consider the social elements of dance classes through describing unexpected situations that arose and observations we made, as a way of making sense of what took place in the classes, to inform our future projects, and perhaps the projects of other groups
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