“You don’t look like a dancer!”: Gender and disability politics in the arena of dance as performance and as a tool for learning in South Africa

Abstract

abstractThis briefing interrogates disability and its activist and artistic engagement with (contemporary) dance by looking at the legacies of current integrated/disabled dance programmes and companies Candoco in the United Kingdom and Remix in South Africa. This briefing links feminist engagement with critical dance studies to break male codes of reception and assumed hegemonic ‘correct’ dancing bodies, with disability studies and the politics around representations of ‘wellness’. A gendered case study of the politics and process of working in a performance and dance educational environment with young disabled dancers in a programme run by myself and FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY in Durban called LeftFeetFIRST! is shared. The core argument is that dance's engagement with disability, under the right circumstances, can be a liberatory pedagogy.